We will not see them described as having this malady, but it is a tag that could readily be associated with a number of billionaires. Yes, in many cases, the rich are different, or perhaps their extreme wealth allows them to act in ways that would not be tolerated in most people.

These billionaires could not possibly spend a tenth of their wealth in either their lifetimes, nor several succeeding generations lifetimes. And yet, they actively pursue policies that would hurt the elderly, and the poor, and if fact, anyone who cannot protect themselves.

It's how a John Dupont or a Robert Durst, or yes, a Donald Trump exists.

But these are extreme examples. A more telling one, at least to me, would be the Koch Brothers, or Pete Peterson. According to many accounts, they are using their wealth to seed politicians who will enact legislation like privatizing Social Security, or eliminating Medicare. And more folks have to rely on both due to the elimination of good paying jobs.

In the Koch Brothers case, they seek to destroy the EPA as well. Anyone remember Love Canal? That's what you can expect if the Trump led Republican Congress is successful in doing away with the EPA.

If you take away the "need" motive, as in the Koch's need the money they would save by not having to comply with basic EPA standards, then you have to ask why? Why do something that will harm so many people? Why deny climate change when it will affect everyone eventually, including Koch family heirs?

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Friday, August 23, 2013

Pandemic, schmandemic

by digby

I wanted to leave you all with a nice animal video or a pretty picture to end this long August week, but then I read this about the National Institute of Health:

An already stagnant budget was made worse this spring when Congress and
the White House failed to prevent sequestration. The NIH was forced to
cut $1.7 billion from its budget by the end of September, lowering its
purchasing power about 25 percent, compared with 2003.

Roughly six months into sequestration, however, the situation is worse
than predicted. Internal NIH estimates show that it will end up cutting
more than the 700 research grants the institutes initially planned to
sacrifice in the name of austerity. If lawmakers fail to replace
sequestration at the end of September, that number could rise above
1,000 as the NIH absorbs another 2 percent budget cut on top of the 5
percent one this fiscal year.

"It is so unimaginable that I would be in a position of somehow saying
that this country is unable to see the rationality of covering what
biomedicine can do," Collins said, in an interview with The Huffington
Post. "But I'm not sure from what I see right now that rationality
carries the day."

The real-world implications of irrationality, Collins added, are quite
grave. His most vivid example is the flu vaccine, which he says could be
as close as five years away from discovery. NIH officials are working
to insulate that program from budget cuts. But sequestration will, at
the very least, mean that research goes slower than it could.

"If you want to convert this into real meaningful numbers, that means
people are going to die of influenza five years from now because we
don't yet have the universal vaccine," he said. "And God help us if we
get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which
takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for. If we had the universal
vaccine, it would work for that too.

"The clock's been ticking on the potential of the next eruption of a
pandemic outbreak from South Asia or wherever. And we've gotten lucky so
far [that it hasn't happened]. But are we going to stay lucky? So, how
can you justify doing anything other than pulling out all the stops in
that kind of circumstance? And yet we're prevented from doing so."

Well that's certainly an upper.

Remember, this isn't because there isn't enough money. There's plenty of
money. This is happening because rich people are hoarding all their
money, we are spending vast sums on a global military empire and the
political system is totally dysfunctional.

You are living in interesting times. If you young people live long
enough --- and the country and planet survive --- you'll have quite a
tale to tell your grand kids. Nobody will believe what morons we were.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

For A Dancer

"Keep a fire for the human race Let your prayers go drifting into space You never know what will be coming down Perhaps a better world is drawing near And just as easily it could all disappear Along with whatever meaning you might have found Don't let the uncertainty turn you around (the world keeps turning around and around) Go on and make a joyful sound." Into a dancer you have grownFrom a seed somebody else has thrownGo on ahead and throw some seeds of your ownAnd somewhere between the time you arriveAnd the time you goMay lie a reason you were aliveBut you'll never know. For A Dancer- Jackson Browne

It's called fairness. And Jeralyn at Talk Left has a post
and a comment thread that illustrate what an enormous difference it
makes in the way liberals and conservatives approach the political
battlefield.
Jeralyn argues that progressives should hold their fire in opposing
the nomination of Bob . . . I mean John Roberts until more of the facts
are in:

I'd like to know more about him before I make up my mind. I
don't think it helps that liberal groups are coming out swinging so
soon. It has the appearance that they would oppose anyone Bush would
nominate.

Now her position is eminently reasonable -- in both senses of the
word. Jeralyn is taking the classic rationalist approach to questions of
fact: let both sides argue their case, sift and weigh the evidence,
then decide. It's how lawyers, and most particularly judges, are trained
to look at the world.
But it's also the classically liberal approach to politics, in which
the struggle for power is treated like some kind of glorified courtroom
debate, with strict rules of evidence, an impartial umpire (the judge)
and 12 jurors, straight and true, to render a verdict.
Not suprisingly, given the quality of Jeralyn's readers, the comment
thread on her post reflects this same deliberative, thoughtful approach.
To be sure, the liberal talking points against Roberts are represented.
But you'll also find a number of comments like this:

The worst thing the left could do at this point is to give a knee-jerk, predictable response. Let's just wait and see.

_______________

Of all the choices he was seriously considering, I think
John Roberts is one of the least objectionable mainly because of his
superlative legal mind.

_______________

We definitely need to hear more, but we need to use caution in opposing him just because he's conservative.

These aren't trolls. These are liberals talking. But if you scroll
down towards the bottom of the thread, you finally get the conservative
response:

The heading of this blog tells it all - "Too soon to bash
John G. Roberts" .... LOL. I read that to mean...you'll eventually bash
him, just not yet...!

And of course, Jeralyn's anonymous troll picks out the one
comment on the thread that suggests Roberts should be opposed simply
because Bush appointed him -- a remark posted by someone using the World
Socialist Web Site as a return email address. This, our troll
screeches, is the "typical lefty reaction."
That's pretty much the last ten years of American political history
in a nutshell. While liberals sift and weigh the evidence, debate
alternative points of view, and reach for that ever elusive "fairness,"
the conservative machine sifts and weighs alternative propaganda points,
debates the best way to manipulate public opinion, and reaches for
power -- first, last and always.
The modern conservative movement understands that fair and balanced
is a marketing slogan: an Orwellian label for its exact opposite. Or, as
David Horowitz wrote in his Art of Political Warfare -- a totalitarian how-to manual for GOP candidates and conservative activists:

You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a
political debate. You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction:
"In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's
argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth."

Lenin: (teary eyed) He's like the son I never had!
I think we all understand what the conservative response would be in
the current situation if the tables were turned: Attack, attack, attack.
Ted Kennedy clone! Wild eyed radical pro-sodomy extremist! Vince
Foster's murderer!
This isn't about legal qualifications or judicial philosophy or even
political ideology. It's about power -- and smearing the other side's
nominees is a great way to rev up the base, do some fundraising and, if
you get lucky, collect another scalp.
There are liberals who know how to play that game -- like the
staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee who leaked Anita Hill's
allegations against Clarence Thomas to the media. But the hardball
players on our side constantly have to manuever around the
"fairness" faction, which insists on clinging to old-fashioned notions
like due process and the burden of proof. (Hill's harrassment claims
were leaked to put pressure on Joe Biden, the Judiciary Committee
chairman at the time, who didn't want to let Hill testify in public.)
The hardball players, on their side, on the other hand, get
nicknames like "the president's brain," have offices in the West Wing,
and can count on entire legions of GOP Senators and People's Deputies to
act like human minesweepers if that's what it takes to clear a path for
their attacks.
This is the world we live in. No one is going to hand out brownie
points to progressives for being "fair" to Judge Roberts. His record is
admittedly thin, but what there is certainly points to a judge on the
extreme conservative end of the scale, not just on reproductive rights,
but on the environment, corporate regulation and civil liberties.
Roberts also has absolutely no experience -- zippo -- in the criminal
justice system. And as Jeralyn herself points out,
the criminal justice system in this country is a freaking horror show
at the street level. It also generates a substantial share of the case
load for the Supremes, thanks to our never-ending war on drug users.
These would be abundant reasons to oppose Roberts as actively as possible -- if
his qualifications and philosophy were the only issues. But they're
not. This nomination is just a battle in a much larger political war,
and as Horowitz puts it:

The act of defining combatants is analogous to the military
concept of choosing the terrain of battle. Choose the terrain that makes
the fight as easy for you as possible.

Stalin: (puffs out his chest) I always knew that boy would make good!
The real question, then, is purely pragmatic: Do the political
benefits of going to the mat over Roberts outweigh the costs? My
judgement (and I realize I could be wrong about this) is that they do
not -- both because he looks just about impossible to stop, and because
even bigger Supreme Court battles almost certainly lie ahead: after
Rehnquist and then when the first of the "liberal" justices retires. And
that last one really does promise to be the judicial battle of
Armageddon.
Under the circumstances, it might be better to save our meager
ammunition for those later struggles -- which, with luck, may be fought
out after the 2006 elections, giving the Dems a chance to improve their
bargaining position by picking up a few seats.
As I said, I could be wrong, and I'm certainly open to persuasion.
But withholding fire on Robers out of some high-minded sense of
"fairness," or a desire to consider all the facts -- well, I think it
should be obvious that we don't live in that kind of country any more.
And if progressives don't start adapting their principles to fit that
reality, we could find ourselves living in an even more mindlessly
reactionary one before long.

Children born since the year ~1995 will need to have the concept of a
pension explained to them. It will be about as relevant to their lives
as the carburetor, the telephone switchboard operator, and the Victrola.
And we will have to explain that after St. Ronnie descended from heaven
and a lot of people in expensive suits spent ten years doing blow,
corporate America came up with this great idea: rather than having a
defined benefit, why not have defined contribution retirement
plans? It would cost employers far less, sure, but it would benefit the
working stiff, too! Why be saddled to a defined benefit when you can
invest your money in Mutual Funds (remember when those were all the
rage? Gosh, I Love the 90s!tm) and watch it grow, like, 10-15% per year! Hell, maybe 20%.
The internet came along at just the right time to make this seem
plausible. Look! Websites! E-Trade! You can be your own stockbroker!
Sure, nobody really understands any of this shit, but…Mutual Funds! A
trained monkey could pick those, and our Investment Professionals take
care of the rest. You just get a drink with an umbrella in it, sit back,
and watch your money grow.
Now that this new era of capitalism is mature – if any aspect of such
a scheme can be so labeled – it turns out that the estimates of future
gains may have been slightly exaggerated. Maybe we all were a tad
optimistic. So maybe it has been more like 5% annualized, if you're
lucky. And then there's the Investment Professionals. Boy, we should
maybe have screened them a little more carefully, or supervised them a
little, or maybe not incentivised gambling with your money for
short-term gains. And then there was that whole real estate thing, which
no one could have foreseen. Everyone knows that real estate is a good
investment! OK, OK. Lessons learned.
Here in academia, we're one of many professions currently bemoaning
the sluggish job market and pointing to Aging Boomers Who Won't Retire
as part of the problem. Having almost completely abandoned the defined
benefit in favor of defined contribution plans 20 years ago, apparently
it never dawned on our social betters that people won't necessarily
retire when we (collectively) might like them to if we give them a
retirement plan with a value that changes, quite literally, by the
second. Oddly enough, they seem to be hanging on "just another year or
two" hoping that The Market will increase the value of their savings –
savings that are, even among responsible savers, often pretty meager.
"I guess they should have saved more!" we say with wagging chins and
scornful glances. Well, thanks to another invention of the 1980s –
constant downward pressure on wages, temp-ification of the profession,
and so on – even people who saved rather aggressively might have amassed
comparatively little over their working lives, given the cost of living
as they cross age 65. It turns out that if a worker's retirement
savings is a percentage of their earnings and you pay them jack shit,
they reach their late 60s and can't necessarily afford to retire.
Contrary to the propaganda, most people in higher education are not
making a ton of money. And then people in the profession wonder, gee,
why won't all these old people just retire? Well, saving 20% per year on
a salary that topped out at $68,000 after forty years isn't going to be
very reassuring to a 65 year old. What if I live another 20 years, they
think. Better work just a few more…
Everyone in this country tells you that things like communism only
work In Theory, and they are right. What they neglect to mention is that
most of the things about the system we have in place – and actively
endorse at all levels of society – only work In Theory too. Sure,
401(k)s sounded great, if the market gave 10% annualized returns and if
one's income increased steadily over the life course. That's two Ifs too
many, and the end result has been a predictable trainwreck: too many
elderly people end up having to retire on Social Security and little
else, or they simply work until they drop waiting for their 401(k) of
magic beans to grow another 10 or 20 percent.
With no disrespect to the older readers, watching a 77 year old
perform most jobs is not an inspiring sight. Someone pushing 80 has no
business being in a classroom, for example. Yet here they are, still
teaching, still doing any other profession in which a mandatory
retirement age can't be (or isn't) enforced. For years (not
coincidentally, the years I was desperately searching for a job) I
wondered what was wrong with these people. Why won't they retire? Are
they selfish? Senile? Delusional? Over time I learned, though, what
three decades of stagnant salaries, increasingly expensive health
benefits, and the "slight" under-performance of the ol' Employee
Retirement Plan can do to one's definition of the right time to retire.
Meanwhile, the real under- and unemployment rate for people in their
twenties is, what, 50%?
But hey, it saved our employers money. So it's a win, according to
the gospel of American economic wisdom (St. Friedman version).

PHILIP KERRis a Scottish born author of some 20 books, many of which are centered in Germany pre, during and post WWII with a protagonist named Bernhard Gunther...crime noir novels with an historical background.

This was an interesting line from The One From The Other :

"If there's one thing history has taught me to believe it is that it's dangerous to believe in anything very much. Especially in Germany. The trouble is that we take belief much too seriously."

AUSTERITY

Despite evidence to the contrary, the people making the decisions are not stupid, and they are not mislead. They are doing the bidding of the Bankers and the super wealthy. The mafia couldn't do it any better...

The Ignoramus Strategy

A while back Noah Smith
described one common strategy for arguing against Keynesian economics,
and yours truly in particular: “Relentlessly pretend to be an ignorant
simpleton.” Of course, as always, this strategy is most effective if you
aren’t pretending, and really are an ignorant simpleton.
Which brings me to this rant by Ken Langone, in which he answers my arguments by saying,

Let’s stop all this crap with all of these high fallutin’
thoughts and ideas. You know what happens to people their eyes glaze
over, I don’t know what the hell he’s saying.

This may, by the way, be the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say “high fallutin” outside of an old Western.
Anyway, this wounds my vanity. I like to imagine that I’m pretty good
at making economic arguments as simple as possible, and stating them in
plain English. True, I never get to the simplicity of “People are
having to tighten their belts, so the government should tighten its belt
too.” But that’s because the world isn’t that simple, and some lines
sound good but are just wrong.
Now, I don’t know if Langone is really as dumb as he sounds; my guess
is, probably not — the attempt to sound like a regular guy, while
actually sounding like an actor in a 1950s B-movie, is a giveaway.
Still, maybe this is an occasion to restate what is really going on in
the economy, and why I advocate the things I do.
So, in order:
1. The economy isn’t like an individual family that earns a certain
amount and spends some other amount, with no relationship between the
two. My spending is your income and your spending is my income. If we
both slash spending, both of our incomes fall.
2. We are now in a situation in which many people have cut spending,
either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to,
while relatively few people are willing to spend more. The result is
depressed incomes and a depressed economy, with millions of willing
workers unable to find jobs.
3. Things aren’t always this way, but when they are, the government is not in competition with the private sector.
Government purchases don’t use resources that would otherwise be
producing private goods, they put unemployed resources to work.
Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private borrowing, it puts idle
funds to work. As a result, now is a time when the government should be
spending more, not less. If we ignore this insight and cut government
spending instead, the economy will shrink and unemployment will rise. In
fact, even private spending will shrink, because of falling incomes.
4. This view of our problems has made correct predictions over the
past four years, while alternative views have gotten it all wrong.
Budget deficits haven’t led to soaring interest rates (and the Fed’s
“money-printing” hasn’t led to inflation); austerity policies have
greatly deepened economic slumps almost everywhere they have been tried.
5. Yes, the government must pay its bills in the long run. But
spending cuts and/or tax increases should wait until the economy is no
longer depressed, and the private sector is willing to spend enough to
produce full employment.
Is this impossibly complicated? I don’t think so. Now, I suppose that
someone like Langone will just respond that it’s all gibberish he can’t
understand. But unless he really is stupid, which as I said I doubt,
that’s only because he doesn’t want to understand.

BOSTON...

My father grew up in the area between Boston and Worcester in a small town, S. Lancaster, and he attended Worcester Prep and graduated from MIT. My summer vacations growing up consisted of a long car trip to my Nana's home for a one or two week stay. So I feel a little bit of a connection to Boston, outside of the fact that Philadelphia, where I grew up and Boston are pretty much twin cities with alternative attitudes.

The whole horrible Boston Marathon event, happening in prime time, serves as a primer in how the US media operates, and the insidious anti-Muslim perspective that is inculcated into our daily media. I don't recall anyone castigating the murderer of an abortion doctor as a fanatical Christian, or Timothy McVeigh as a US military trained locally grown terrorist.In reality, in the case of these bothers, we have disaffected young men who are products of a dysfunctional family. They are no more Muslim terrorists than the young man who murdered 20 some kids in Connecticut was a "Christian" terrorist. Who's to say that the hate speech heard every day on US radio hasn't resulted in just as many deaths as that of Muslim radical Iman? To be clear, hate speech is what it is, but it is only words. It is the individual who responds to those words, which has most to do with that individual's ignorance and world view, and subsequent actions. Both television and social media could not help themselves in the ongoing melodrama in Boston. Homeland in real time, and a testament to News as Entertainment.

Compare the coverage of the West,Texas conflagration that killed 14 people and almost totally decimated what would appear to be a "Company town"(not unlike some mining towns in West Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere). Compare the follow up stories in the WSJ and the NYTimes to West's. And in my humble opinion, is the underlying reason why the mainstream media, both print and television, are in rapid decline...they no longer provide independent coverage of information that a functioning populace require. The failure to understand that the traditional media are in competition with the more immediate social media like Twitter, will result in a continued decline and eventually (I hope) to ownership being shed by public corporations.

The Great Mulligan

There has been some low hilarity, and one
high crime against history and memory, attending the sudden reappearence
on the scene of C-Plus Augustus, the previous president of these United
States. The occasion is the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, in which it is rumored that every book starts with Chapter 11. (Apparently, one of the exhibits is an interactive quiz that
asks the visitor to the museum what the visitor would do if confronted
by all the things that got themselves fked up during the Avignon
Presidency. My answer to all of them would be, "Don't let Mickey The
Dunce steal Florida," but that's just me.) However, the opening of the
library roughly coincided with the bloody events surrounding the Boston
Marathon, and that has prompted yet another revival of the brutally
dishonest notion that the presidency of George W. Bush began on
September 12, 2001, that he arose, full-grown, from the rubble of lower
Manhattan.The best example came from the inexplicably employed Jennifer Rubin, who took to her space in the inexplicably still publishing Washington Post op-ed
pre-school to argue the following, as our old friend, Clio, Muse Of
History, started guzzling Popov and huffing airplane glue:

Unlike Obama's tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.

Thus do we confront what we can call The Great Mulligan, which is
granted by the dimmer lights in the chandelier to the president and to
the national security team — Hi, Condi! — who presided over the most
massive intelligence failure in American history, and over the greatest
loss of life to an enemy attack on American soil since everybody hugged
it out at Appomattox. This has popped up from time to time in the years
since it became obvious what a complete and utter failure the Bush
presidency really was. Sorry we lied you into a war, but we kept you safe. Sorry we demolished American values, and just about every shred of American moral credibility in the world, but we kept you safe. Sorry we let New Orleans drown, but we kept you safe. Sorry we allowed the national economy to blow up, but we kept you safe. In
fact, if you sent C-Plus Augustus into his own museum, and had him take
that interactive quiz, and provided he didn't break a thumb trying to
get a Diet Coke out of the exhibit, his answer to everything would be I kept you safe.
No. In fact, you didn't. Stop saying that before 3000 ghosts come to
your room some night and pummel you with ectoplasmic bags of sheep dung.
The historical record is quite clear. Upon taking office, the Bush
administration de-emphasized the Clinton team's almost-obsessive search
for Osama bin Laden. That's why Richard Clarke got shoved aside. That's
why John Ashcroft changed the FBI's focus from the pursuit of
international terrorists to the pursuit of Tommy Chong. That's why
presidential daily press briefings didn't get read while the president
was clearing brush the month before the attacks. It's also why his
briefer on the topic got himself told, "You covered your ass now." But
that was nothing compared to the ass-covering that went on in the
aftermath of the attacks — Really, now, Condi. A "historical document"?
That's still hilarious. — as the members of the administration tried to
prevaricate their way out of their abject failure to keep anyone safe.
It was nine months of misfeasance in office, and inexcusable neglect of
duty, that ended in the deaths of more than 3000 Americans.
And I am sorry. But you don't get a free one on these. You cannot argue that you kept us safe after
your obvious negligence played a role in getting 3000 of us killed. We
should laugh at anyone who tries to make this argument, and we should be
angered that a presidential library puts together an exhibit of the all
the cock-ups that followed the biggest cock-up of them all, and asks,
arrogantly, the same question posed to generations of sportswriters by
half-bright outfielders after they let one get by them to cost their
team a ballgame.What would you have done, motherfker? You ever play the game?
The very fact that anyone, even Jennifer Rubin, would make this
argument publicly illustrates that we have not entirely integrated the
facts of the 9/11 attacks into their proper place in our history and our
memory. They were acts of savagery, but they were not mindless. They
were deliberate and well-planned and they largely succeeded. Our
national intelligence systems, and the people who were running them at
the time, up to and including the incurious president of the United
States, wandering the Texas scrub with his chain-saw, failed utterly to
confront even the possibility that such attacks were possible, and thus
failed utterly to keep anyone safe. Then, they responded by lying the
country into a war of aggression that failed to keep thousands of
American soldiers safe, that failed to keep hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis safe, failed to keep the rule of law safe, and failed to keep the
national economy, and the people who depend on it, which is pretty much
all of us, safe. Those are only some of the things that C-Plus Augustus
failed to keep safe, and they all pretty much began when he failed to
keep 3000 of our fellow citizens safe in New York and Washington, and in
a field in Pennsylvania, where died some brave people who actually did
keep some people safe. All of the worst parts of that presidency flowed
from that simple fact — that we did not really confront what happened on
September 11, 2001 but, rather, allowed ourselves and our memory to be
seduced by simpleton narratives of collective innocence, which
necessarily included the simpleton narrative that our leaders were
innocent victims of diabolical agencies the true nature of which —
"Nobody could have conceived of using a airliner as a missile." Except, of course, that people had been talking about it for years.
Thanks again, Condi. — they could not be expected to understand.
Everything that came afterwards, everything that makes the new library a
monument to everything libraries are not supposed to be about, proceeds
from our granting to these people The Great Mulligan.

THE TRUTH SUCKS SOMETIMESToday, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the 21st century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semi-automatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the third world, and great banks are there to serve the public."I have met the enemy and it is us!"-Pogohttp://tinyurl.com/c3td9tgTHE RICH ARE REALLY DIFFERENTWho amongst us has not dreamed of winning the Lottery...you know, the really huge, unbelievably large payoff? Well next time you do, think of this true depiction of how corrupting real wealth is.It is my solemn hope that people like the Koch brothers will find their just rewards...http://tinyurl.com/ch4edyzOLD FOLKSMy online friend, Ronni Bennett publishes a wonderful blog centered on BEING old, and the American attitudes toward us old folks. Her blog is both personal and general and well worth the time. You can check it out at; http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/Her post today is on "Facebook/Hatebook" and the expressed attitudes found on Facebook posts. It got me to thinking about how I thought of Seniors when I was younger. Mostly, I didn't. That is, I really didn't think much about seniors, mostly, I guess, because I never saw myself as getting old. I remember getting in a yelling contest with another drive (it happens) when I was about 42 and him calling me an "old fart". What?? And the biggest shock was when my (then) doctor called me "elderly" at age 62. I was both shocked and pissed, and though she tried to walk it back, I guess I never really forgave her.One memory I do have is that there was a woman who I used to see walking all over Germantown, where I grew up. I'd see her almost every day and she obviously covered a lot of ground. And I had a lot of respect for her, and the fact that she was not one to sit around. I imagined that she was in very good shape, and this was long before there was public acclimation for exercise for seniors.But I never spoke to her. I'd nod, and I'm sure she recognized me, but we never spoke. And I now believe that my attitude was a result of several contributing factors...

American culture, centered around television and all consuming advertising, was always directed at the young demographic;

Families, in general, no longer had multiple generations living under the same roof...children to a large extent viewed their grandparents as if they are just related adults, not unlike other adults, the exceptions being newly arrived immigrants who were not only used to cohabiting with their grandparents, but in many cases had no economic alternative;

Retiring to some warm, and in many cases less expensive environment upon retirement leaving family behind.

Native Americans and many Asian cultures have/had the exact opposite view of old people, showing great respect for seniors, and welcoming seniors' carried knowledge and experiences.

Ironically, the erosion of the middle class in this country will probably do more to change things than Facebook. Families will be forced to take care of seniors, and probably in many cases will need the Social Security income that accompany those old folks. And seniors will find it more and more difficult to economically live independently.

Let's hope that there will be SS in every one's future.As to the Facebook/Hatebook thing, I'm guessing there are a couple of different things working there:

The Internet comment sections are a great place for cowards to post comments that they would never make in public...especially face-to-face;

An attempt at shock, which is often the basis of certain kinds of humor (see George Carlin), although most attempts would fall short;

Old folks are easy targets.

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that all you have to do is click off a site or comment. If I get emotional about some clown's tweet or Facebook post it is really more about me.

I'll save myself the aggravation.HISTORY WILL NOT BE DENIEDWOW. 70 year old Wizard of Oz song "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" rockets to top of charts in UK after Thatchers death http://bbc.in/YhLtg7

STEALTH ECONOMYIn effect, we have a Stealth Economy, that is, an economy where the profits are rising while the bulk of the workers wind up with a smaller and smaller share, and the Hedge Fund Managers and their extremely wealthy investors reap some 98% of the rewards.The Obama "Grand Bargain" is being offered as a way to keep the Democrats from taking control of the House in 2014. Obama, and the DSCC do not want to be in the position of having total control of Congress. If they enjoy total control, the Dems will have no excuses for not passing legislation that works for the general public.Rather, the current status quo enables the Oligarchs (eg The Koch Brosthers), Big Oil, Defense Contractors, Health Insurers, and of course Wall Street to continue to extract wealth from the Treasury while attention is focused on Congress' stasis.Any clear thinking person can see that the creation of jobs...good paying jobs...would not only be politically popular, but would be economically positive. But the powers that control the real action would rather continue to reap the rewards they are currently enjoying. The poverty rate is rapidly increasing, fed by a growing class of "Working Poor". The Country's infrastrucure is deteriorating before our eyes. A 21st Century WPA would put people to work while dealing with the crumbling power grid, sewers, water supplies, roads, etc. The question remains: When will enough people finally decide to do something about it?Perhaps the plight of the young and educated, who are aware that their futures are not so bright they need sunglasses, will begin to force change. Or perhaps it will be military vets who find themselves in the same position that Vietnam vets and before them, Korean War vets found themselves: ignored and forgotten.All you have to do is look at the Establishment's reaction to the erstwhile OccupyWallStreet group to see how daunting it is to contemplate doing something. I hope when it does happen, it will be peaceful. If Ghandi could force the Brits to grant independence, there is hope for us...

A LESSON ON LIVING...AND DYINGhttp://tinyurl.com/d7wg829DRONESJohn Brennan 's CIA confirmation hearings, and the subsequent filibuster of (of all people) Rand Paul, has brought the whole issue of the use of drones into a public discourse, even though the Obama administration apparently still refuses to acknowledge a drone program.Paul's filibuster included many questions on the use of drones on American soil, and whether an American life could/would be targeted on American soil. Leaving aside many ethical and moral dimensions of the use of drones, and the Emporer's president's Constitutional right to unilaterally decide whom to kill, let's look at the use of drones as it relates to our treasured "Homeland Security"...and yes, the pun is deliberate. Drones are inexpensive, and offer inexhaustible opportunities to spy on citizens as well as alternatives to police use.It is only a matter of time until we see drones used in commercial use as well. A drone would probably be a very useful tool for doing things like checking pipelines, or perhaps security for installations...think of a drone as a mobile camera.So it is also a matter of time until drones fall into the wrong hands. And if we have a sky full of both government owned and commercial owned drones, keeping track of which is which will become problematical.The drones are controlled by radio waves electronically, so will it be possible to "hack a drone"? I'm guessing yes.You can expect Popular Mechanics to have an article on how to make your own drone. The 20th Century saw the end of any pretense of the idea that war is honorable. Drone warfare takes that to another level. And domestic use of drones will just be the next plateau. YOUR FUTUREMost people have no idea how poorly they are prepared for their second life, aka becoming "elderly".

The trashing of 401ks in the 2007 debacle should scare people, not to mention the loss of one's home as a savings/growth asset.

Some 64% of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical issues, and most of those individuals were working.

It only takes one unexpected issue...an auto accident, or a legal problem of someone in the family to change one's financial well being.

And even if you are not yet in the "senior" category, you had better start thinking about it.

The four business gangs that run the US

The Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor

IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ''corporatocracy''.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ''As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,'' he says.

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Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

These days, almost every US Treasury secretary - Republican or Democrat - comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The close ties between Wall Street and Washington ''paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government''.

Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.

''Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.''

Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.

It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.

''And Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.''

Fourth is the healthcare industry, America's largest industry, absorbing no less than 17 per cent of US gross domestic product.

''The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control,'' Sachs says. ''Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.

''The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.''

Now do you see why the industry put so much effort into persuading America's punters that Obamacare was rank socialism? They didn't succeed in blocking it, but the compromised program doesn't do enough to stop the US being the last rich country in the world without universal healthcare.

It's worth noting that, despite its front-running cost, America's healthcare system doesn't leave Americans with particularly good health - not as good as ours, for instance. This conundrum is easily explained: America has the highest-paid doctors.

Sachs says the main thing to remember about the corporatocracy is that it looks after its own. ''There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America.

''Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy,'' he says.

The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America's rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.

''It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.''

Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It's not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.

Fortunately, things aren't nearly so bad in Australia. But it will require vigilance to stop them sliding further in that direction.

Twitter: @1Ross Gittins

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-four-business-gangs-that-run-the-us-20121230-2c1e2.html#ixzz2H2TRh0vEHAPPY NEW YEAR, 2013Perspectives change as we age, and a "New Year" has different meaning to a 70 something than to, say a 60 something year old person. It isn't because we know we are closer to dying, although that is true if one makes it to the age of 70. It is more a function of the feeling as an ordinary man, that what one thinks is no longer particularly relevant to the daily comings and goings of life. It is just adding another integer to the date, and context to one's age, which is why we no longer care to stay up to welcome in the new year.We watched a Thin Man movie last night, one that was made in 1936 (I was born in 1940), and following that was the movie, The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, which was made in 1960, and we realized that we saw that movie over 60 years ago. I am absolutely sure that when I saw that movie, in a theater, that I never considered the fact that one day I would look back and remember it as a part of my youth. I never thought about reaching age 60, 70, or beyond. Getting old was for one's parents.Instead of life slowing as I age, it seems to be moving in double time. When synopses appear on what happened, or on who died in 2012, I can scarcely believe all that I have already forgotten. I attribute this to the incredible amount of information I am exposed to on a daily basis. Instead of getting a report of something in a daily newspaper, or on the hour of TV news, we get it 24/7 on cable or the internet. It's like drinking through a fire hose.As a contrast, when we were talking about the Korean War last night, my wife asked when that was and I responded it started on June 25, 1950. She was incredulous as to how I knew that, and it was because it was the day before my highly anticipated 10th birthday, and the morning Inquirer had a huge headline: "North Korea invades South Korea". I wonder if kids today would remember something like that.

THE NHL AS METAPHOR FOR THE US CORPORATOCRACYThe final stages of the process depend on the broader pattern of decline. In Toynbee’s analysis, a civilization in decline always divides into a dominant minority, which maintains its power by increasingly coercive means, and an internal proletariat—that is, the bulk of the population, who are formally part of the civilization but receive an ever smaller share of its benefits and become ever more alienated from its values and institutions. This condition applies to the imperial state and its inner circle of allies; outside that core lies the world of the external proletariat—in the terms used in earlier posts here, these are the peoples subjected to the business end of the imperial wealth pump, whose wealth flows inward to support the imperial core but who receive few benefits in exchange. http://tinyurl.com/ct5oubeThe quoted post was written about the end of empires, but it could easily be about the NHL and its approach to collective bargaining. It is one thing for a massively successful NFL to be so arrogant, but quite another for a sports league struggling to be recognized in the same context as the NFL and NBA. The decision to lockout the players is strictly the move of a bully, a move based on greed, arrogance and willingness to screw both one's employees and one's customers to force the opponent to turtle. Tactics like a lockout are incredibly short sided, especially when one's employees are one's product/talent. Payback is a bitch-and there will be payback. It's only a matter of time before there will be competition. And with TV and the Internet, it will be easier than ever for competition to develop.The same thing is happening with the US.

HOW TO CREATE JOBSThe actual taxes paid by most of the Fortune 1000 companies in 2012 is incredibly low. Many corporations not only pay no taxes, but get tax rebates (GE). A consequence: non government entities are sitting on trillions of dollars in cash.Personal taxes on the wealthiest among us are also at historical lows. As a result, there is little or no incentive on either a corporate or an individual business owner to invest in plant, equipment and added personel. If corporate and individual tax rates are raised...let's say to an average of the tax rates of Germany, France. and Britain, you would have a situation where corporations and individuals would look to get better returns on investing while lowering their taxable income. One result would be added jobs.Added jobs would have a multiplying effect on the economy, as the more people working, the more money the general public will spend, which in turn will see a further increase in jobs to meet increased demand.Increases in workers will also mean increases in taxes collected, which along with the increased individual and corporate taxes paid, would reduce our debt.Bingo.THANKSGIVING 2012

THANKS:For LoveFor being lovedFor childrenFor grandchildrenFor parentsFor grandparentsFor good healthFor still having the freedom to speak the truthFor speaking the truthFor the rise in Atheism...which I suspect will eventually lead to less warsA ceasefire of some sort in Gaza.For musicMay you love and be loved.May you be thankful for all you have.DRONESThe short sightedness of decisions in our immediate-demanding world never ceases to amaze. Drones are made to order for non-major states or terrorist organizations. Drones will make the US far more vulnerable to attack, which is ironic. Ironic because "defense" has been the stated motive for spending more than the rest of the free world combined by a country with friendly neighbors on two sides, and thousand of miles of open oceans on the other two sides.Drones will make it far easier for enemies of the US to deliver bombs and missiles to US bases and eventually to targets on the mainland...or should I say Homeland?And now that we have allowed our chief executive to unilaterally choose and murder people deemed to be enemies of the US, how long will it be until blowback? Think of the reaction in this country to 9/11. Reaction that saw Americans lose their minds and want to attack another country, regardless of whether that country had anything to do with 9/11. What makes anyone think that each drone attack will not create the same kind of reaction?But then that's the great advantage of short term thinking. The blowback will invariably be on future generations. Let someone else pay the price.Violence always begets more violence.LIFE ON ONE FOOTIt will be three weeks tomorrow since my surgery to repair a torn tendon in my foot. When it was determined that I had a ruptured Tibialis Posterior Tendon, I expected a repair similar to a torn ligament where there is a reattachment and then rehab. Turns out, there is a lot more involved with this injury, including a 3 hour surgery, and a 3 hour recovery in post op.As a consequence, I find myself in a cast for the first time in my life, and a 5 or 6 month rehab. Even then, it will probably be a year before I have fully returned to my pre injury status. Of course, as I am 72 years old, there is no guarantee of that. One of the consequences of my situation is that for the first time for me, the prospect of becoming elderly and less than independent has been forced on me. The initial 3 weeks would have been nearly impossible to navigate without the full time assistance of my wife. Even now, while I have become more accustomed to getting around with a cast on my foot, it would be really difficult to operate without help...and I am retired so I do not have to leave our apartment. I cannot drive with a cast on my right foot, and I expect it will be at least a couple of months before I have a removable weight bearing cast, so no driving. Another reminder of loss of control, which I assume is one of the most feared aspects of aging. It isn't that we live our lives without some dependence on others, but we always have this implicit feeling that if necessary, we don't need anyone else to exist. Going through extensive surgery and rehab is a reminder of our vulnerability. "THE OWNERS ARE THE RANCH AND THE PLAYERS ARE THE CATTLE"This gem was spoken in an interview concerning the lockout of the NHL players by the owners of NHL teams. It could have easily been, in another time: "There are Masters and there are Slaves".If you add it to Mitt Romney's "47%" statement you understand the mentality of the Oligarchs, the 1% of the 1% who pretty much call the shots in the US and increasingly, in the Western World. They are the Kings and everyone else is the furniture.There is a lot to be said for the Ed Sniders of the world who was the driving force in bringing a NHL team to Philadelphia, and building the franchise into one of the most successful in the NHL. I get why Snider would feel that it doesn't happen without him, and a lot of players have had great financial success because of his ownership.But until there are robot ice hockey players, there have to be people who put their bodies and even their lives at risk on the ice in order for Ed Snider to have built his franchise. One doesn't happen without the other. It is the sheer arrogance of Romney's statement that is so revealing. There seems to be no recognition whatsoever that the circumstances of birth had infinitely more to do with success than any other single element. Of course to admit or recognize that would be to acknowledge that it wasn't some supernatural gift that led to success...think The Donald, who started out with a $40 Million real estate portfolio inherited from his father.A good read in this regard is "God Bless You Mr Rosewater" by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's family had been wealthy prior to his generation, so he had more than a passing curiosity on the subject.Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten. Cree Nation Tribal Prophecy

ORWELL WAS RIGHTI fear the folly in which I took part will never end, and society will be irreversibly enmeshed in what George Orwell's 1984 warned of: constant wars against the Other, in order to forge false unity and fealty to the state.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/19/drone-warfare-deadly-civilian-tollWe have reached a stage where the use of drones, like the use of torture and the denial of habeus corpus have become not only routine, but either ignored or accepted by most Americans. The military-industrial folks are more than happy with Obama's presidency, as no Republican President could have been more dedicated to following the dictates of the Empire. Perhaps that is why Romney is the Republican nominee...he almost guarantees another fruitful four years for unrestrained State ordained murder. BLOWBACKImagine you have friends and family at a wedding that is suddenly interrupted by a huge explosion that you later learn was a missile fired without warning from a drone. How would you feel-recover after the loss of loved ones? Would you be satisfied with the responsible Country...one thousands of miles away...saying they did it to kill a terrorist? No? Think you would be feeling this rage against the offending Country, a rage that you have no power to turn into action against that country?Or how about knowing that that Country has been dropping black ops teams into your country to do things like hunt down and kill "terrorists"? If you can put yourself in the place of the people in Egypt, Libya, the Sudan, Pakistan, and who knows how many other countries, you can understand why US embassies are under siege. It may be under the guise of Muslim reaction to a movie, but I see it as a reaction by people who had no other way of showing their rage against the Country that has treated them like they had no say in their own Country. The term to describe this kind of reaction is "Blowback". It is essentially what happens when a Country has too much power...military or economic. It is why so much of the non-western world hates the US, and it is an indication of the crumbling American Empire.The embassy attacks may serve as a minor pre-curser to the blowback we will receive if/when Israel attacks Iran, which many think will be in October, before our election. SIGNS OF CORPORATE OWNERSHIP OF THE US:According to SFGate.com, "Feds are set to auction off parcels to oil and gas companies." California...CALIFORNIA now set to join the list of states allowing the extraction of oil and gas through "fracking". When this can happen in California, the most environmentally conscious State, it is more than a trend...it's a fact of life.Here in Pennsylvania, where thanks to the 2010 election we have an in-the-corporate pocket Governor to go along with our in-the -corporate legislature, we have seen rural towns affected by this pretty much unregulated extraction method. The locals who sell or lease their lands are for it, of course, as it has meant a lot of money for them. The downside for their neighbors...like well water that catches fire...well that's just tough luck.This is just another biproduct of "austerity". States are desperate to find ways to increase revenues without raising taxes. Firing or laying off government workers doesn't increase revenues, and something like 750,000 government jobs have disappeared in the last 4 years. A Keynesian would point out that this is exactly counter to what needs to be done, but the corporatists know that the worse things get, the more they can get away with.In that regard, the extraction of oil and gas is a perfect metaphor for what is being done to the United States.

WHY REPUBLICANS DISMISS SCIENCE:"Its easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."~Mark TwainWhy and how do some Republicans-the ones who seem to now control the Republican Party on the ground-refuse to accept science? This was the subject of a bar conversation the other night. I think it evolves from a core belief of religious fundamentalists, that what they are taught and believe is righteous, and any who do not agree are not to be believed-on anything. Once someone effectively closes their mind to any alternative ideas/beliefs, there is nothing to be gained by talking/arguing with them. And once they have decided that a person/organization is in agreement with their beliefs, they will accept anything from that source. As some have called it, we are dealing with the American Taliban. Once you accept the non-scientific idea of dinosaurs and man existing at the same time, and the earth being 5000 years old, you aren't going to be able to convince them of an alternative.The scary thing is that these Christian Taliban are getting laws changed in some States to allow alternative to accepted science in public schools. WHO ARE WE?John Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s ConstitutionOriginally posted by Shannyn Moore of Just Another Girl from Homer.John Cusack was thinking all this when he talked to Jon Turley, one of the smartest and intellectually honest authorities on the Constitution. — Shannyn Moore* * *Jonathan TURLEY: Hi John.CUSACK: Hello. Okay, hey I was just thinking about all this stuff and thought maybe we’d see what we can do to bring civil liberties and these issues back into the debate for the next couple of months …TURLEY: I think that’s great.CUSACK: So, I don’t know how you can believe in the Constitution and violate it that much.TURLEY: Yeah.CUSACK: I would just love to know your take as an expert on these things. And then maybe we can speak to whatever you think his motivations would be, and not speak to them in the way that we want to armchair-quarterback like the pundits do about “the game inside the game,” but only do it because it would speak to the arguments that are being used by the left to excuse it. For example, maybe their argument that there are things you can’t know, and it’s a dangerous world out there, or why do you think a constitutional law professor would throw out due process?TURLEY: Well, there’s a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are “legal relativists.” They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they’re trying to achieve. I would certainly put President Obama in the relativist category. Ironically, he shares that distinction with George W. Bush. They both tended to view the law as a means to a particular end — as opposed to the end itself. That’s the fundamental distinction among law professors. Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.Truth be known President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.CUSACK: Yeah, so did I.TURLEY: He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs. And to that extent, I like his programs more than Bush’s programs, but Bush and Obama are very much alike when it comes to principles. They simply do not fight for the abstract principles and view them as something quite relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. Thus privacy yields to immunity for telecommunications companies and due process yields to tribunals for terrorism suspects.CUSACK: Churchill said, “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” That wasn’t Eugene Debs speaking — that was Winston Churchill.And if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering U.S. citizens — and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.”– one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices- correct?TURLEY: Well, first of all, there’s a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It’s a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They’ve convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that’s not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.This is nothing new, of course for civil libertarians who have always been left behind at the altar in elections. We’ve always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. We’re used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There’s no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles.So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture.CUSACK: I remember when we were working with Arianna at The Huffington Post and we thought, well, has anyone asked whether waterboarding is torture? Has anyone asked Eric Holder that? And so Arianna had Sam Seder ask him that at a press conference, and then he had to admit that it was. And then the next question, of course, was, well, if it is a crime, are you going to prosecute the law? But, of course, it wasn’t politically expedient to do so, right? That’s inherent in their non-answer and inaction?TURLEY: That’s right.CUSACK: Have you ever heard a more specious argument than “It’s time for us all to move on?” When did the Attorney General or the President have the option to enforce the law?TURLEY: Well, that’s the key question that nobody wants to ask. We have a treaty, actually a number of treaties, that obligate us to investigate and prosecute torture. We pushed through those treaties because we wanted to make clear that no matter what the expediency of the moment, no matter whether it was convenient or inconvenient, all nations had to agree to investigate and prosecute torture and other war crimes.And the whole reason for putting this in the treaties was to do precisely the opposite of what the Obama administration has done. That is, in these treaties they say that it is not a defense that prosecution would be inconvenient or unpopular. But that’s exactly what President Obama said when he announced, “I won’t allow the prosecution of torture because I want us to look to the future and not the past.” That is simply a rhetorical flourish to hide the obvious point: “I don’t want the inconvenience and the unpopularity that would come with enforcing this treaty.”CUSACK: Right. So, in that sense, the Bush administration had set the precedent that the state can do anything it likes in the name of terror, and not only has Obama let that cement harden, but he’s actually expanded the power of the executive branch to do whatever it wants, or he’s lowered the bar — he’s lowered the law — to meet his convenience. He’s lowered the law to meet his personal political convenience rather than leaving it as something that, as Mario Cuomo said, the law is supposed to be better than us.TURLEY: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones?TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.CUSACK: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two U.S. citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any U.S. citizen.CUSACK: But yet the speech that Eric Holder gave was greeted generally, by those others than civil libertarians and a few people on the left with some intellectual honesty, with polite applause and a stunning silence and then more cocktail parties and state dinners and dignitaries, back the Republican Hypocrisy Hour on the evening feed — and he basically gave a speech saying that the executive can assassinate U.S. citizens.TURLEY: That was the truly other-worldly moment of the speech. He went to, Northwestern Law School (my alma mater), and stood there and articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review. The response from the audience was applause. Citizens applauding an Attorney General who just described how the President was claiming the right to kill any of them on his sole inherent authority.CUSACK: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”TURLEY: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy.CUSACK: I think you just gave me the idea for my next film. And the tone will be, of course, Kafkaesque.TURLEY: It really is.CUSACK: You’re at the bottom of the barrel when the Attorney General is saying that not only can you hold people in prison for no charge without due process, but we can kill the citizens that “we” deem terrorists. But “we” won’t do it cause we’re the good guys remember?TURLEY: Well, the way that this works is you have this unseen panel. Of course, their proceedings are completely secret. The people who are put on the hit list are not informed, obviously.CUSACK: That’s just not polite, is it?TURLEY: No, it’s not. The first time you’re informed that you’re on this list is when your car explodes, and that doesn’t allow much time for due process. But the thing about the Obama administration is that it is far more premeditated and sophisticated in claiming authoritarian powers. Bush tended to shoot from the hip — he tended to do these things largely on the edges. In contrast, Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing U.S. citizens. He has used the terminology of the law to seek to legitimate an extrajudicial killing.CUSACK: Yeah, bringing the law down to meet his political realism, his constitutional realism, which is that the Constitution is just a means to an end politically for him, so if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with due process or if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with torture, well, then why should he do that? He’s a busy man. The Constitution is just another document to be used in a political fashion, right?TURLEY: Indeed. I heard from people in the administration after I wrote a column a couple weeks ago about the assassination policy. And they basically said, “Look, you’re not giving us our due. Holder said in the speech that we are following a constitutional analysis. And we have standards that we apply.” It is an incredibly seductive argument, but there is an incredible intellectual disconnect. Whatever they are doing, it can’t be called a constitutional process.Obama has asserted the right to kill any citizen that he believes is a terrorist. He is not bound by this panel that only exists as an extension of his claimed inherent absolute authority. He can ignore them. He can circumvent them. In the end, with or without a panel, a president is unilaterally killing a U.S. citizen. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do.CUSACK: The framers didn’t say, “In special cases, do what you like. When there are things the public cannot know for their own good, when it’s extra-specially a dangerous world… do whatever you want.” The framers of the Constitution always knew there would be extraordinary circumstances, and they were accounted for in the Constitution. The Constitution does not allow for the executive to redefine the Constitution when it will be politically easier for him to get things done.TURLEY: No. And it’s preposterous to argue that.CUSACK: When does it become — criminal?TURLEY: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government.CUSACK: So basically, it comes down to, again, just political expediency and aesthetics. So as long as we have friendly aesthetics and likable people, we can do whatever we want. Who cares what the policy is or the implications for the future.TURLEY: The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That’s where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation.Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They’re both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the U.S. This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries who are shielded or protected by their own countries.CUSACK: Didn’t Spain pull somebody out of Chile under that?TURLEY: Yeah, Pinochet.CUSACK: Yeah, also our guy…TURLEY: The great irony of all this is that we’re the architect of that international process. We’re the one that always pushed for the position that no government could block war crimes prosecution.But that’s not all. The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the “just following orders” defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders. After Nuremberg, there were decades of development of this principle. It’s a very important point, because that defense, if it is allowed, would shield most people accused of torture and war crime. So when the Obama administration –CUSACK: That also parallels into the idea that the National Defense Authorization Act is using its powers to actually not only put a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but actually make it illegal for whistleblowers to bring the truth out. Am I right on that, or is that an overstatement?TURLEY: Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were “just following orders,” but particularly CIA personnel.The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the U.S. under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, “Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he’s dead.” It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration.CUSACK: Yeah.TURLEY: Certainly part of the problem is how the news media –CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an going moral fiasco’s — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new poloicies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?TURLEY: Some in the media have certainly fallen into this cult of personality.CUSACK: What would you say to those people? I always thought the duty of a citizen, and even more so as a journalist, had greatly to do with the idea that intellectual honesty was much more important than political loyalty. How would you compare Alberto Gonzalez to Eric Holder?TURLEY: Oh, Eric Holder is smarter than Gonzalez, but I see no other difference in terms of how they’ve conducted themselves. Both of these men are highly political. Holder was accused of being improperly political during his time in the Clinton administration. When he was up for Attorney General, he had to promise the Senate that he would not repeat some of the mistakes he made in the Clinton administration over things like the pardon scandal, where he was accused of being more politically than legally motivated.In this town, Holder is viewed as much more of a political than a legal figure, and the same thing with Gonzalez. Bush and Obama both selected Attorney Generals who would do what they wanted them to do, who would enable them by saying that no principles stood in the way of what they wanted to do. More importantly, that there were no principles requiring them to do something they didn’t want to do, like investigate torture.CUSACK: So would you say this assassination issue, or the speech and the clause in the NDAA and this signing statement that was attached, was equivalent to John Yoo’s torture document?TURLEY: Oh, I think it’s amazing. It is astonishing the dishonesty that preceded and followed its passage. Before passage, the administration told the public that the president was upset about the lack of an exception for citizens and that he was ready to veto the bill if there was a lack of such an exception. Then, in an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, “I don’t know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House.” Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor, unguarded and unscripted.CUSACK: And finally simple.TURLEY: Yes. So we were basically lied to. I think that the administration was really caught unprepared by that rare moment of honesty, and that led ultimately to his pledge not to use the power to assassinate against citizens. But that pledge is meaningless. Having a president say, “I won’t use a power given to me” is the most dangerous of assurances, because a promise is not worth anything.CUSACK: Yeah, I would say it’s the coldest comfort there is.TURLEY: Yes. This brings us back to the media and the failure to strip away the rhetoric around these policies. It was certainly easier in the Bush administration, because you had more clown-like figures like Alberto Gonzalez. The problem is that the media has tended to get thinner and thinner in terms of analysis. The best example is that about the use of the term “coerced or enhanced interrogation.” I often stop reporters when they use these terms in questions. I say, “I’m not too sure what you mean, because waterboarding is not enhanced interrogation.” That was a myth put out by the Bush administration. Virtually no one in the field used that term, because courts in the United States and around the world consistently said that waterboarding’s torture. Holder admitted that waterboarding’s torture. Obama admitted that waterboarding is torture. Even members of the Bush administration ultimately admitted that waterboarding’s torture. The Bush Administration pushed this term to get reporters to drop the word torture and it worked. They are still using the term.Look at the articles and the coverage. They uniformly say “enhanced interrogation.” Why? Because it’s easier. They want to avoid the controversy. Because if they say “torture,” it makes the story much more difficult. If you say, “Today the Senate was looking into a program to torture detainees,” there’s a requirement that you get a little more into the fact that we’re not supposed to be torturing people.CUSACK: So, from a civil liberties perspective, ravens are circling the White House, even though there’s a friendly man in it.TURLEY: Yeah.CUSACK: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won’t bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office.TURLEY: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you’ll see people talk about –CUSACK: I think that’s being kind, don’t you? More like “abandoned.”TURLEY: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don’t hear the word “torture.”They hear “enhanced interrogation.” They don’t hear much about the treaties. They don’t hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.CUSACK: So the surreal Holder speech — how could it be that no one would be reporting on that? How could it be that has gone by with not a bang but a whimper?TURLEY: Well, you know, part of it, John, I think, is that this administration is very clever. First of all, they clearly made the decision right after the election to tack heavily to the right on national security issues. We know that by the people they put on the National Security Council. They went and got very hardcore folks — people who are quite unpopular with civil libertarians. Not surprisingly we almost immediately started to hear things like the pledge not to prosecute CIA officials and other Bush policies being continued.Many reporters buy into these escape clauses that the administration gives them, this is where I think the administration is quite clever. From a legal perspective, the Holder speech should have been exposed as perfect nonsense. If you’re a constitutional scholar, what he was talking about is facially ridiculous, because he was saying that we do have a constitutional process–it’s just self-imposed, and we’re the only ones who can review it. They created a process of their own and then pledged to remain faithful to it.While that should be a transparent and absurd position, it gave an out for journalists to say, “Well, you know, the administration’s promising that there is a process, it’s just not the court process.” That’s what is so clever, and why the Obama administration has been far more successful than the Bush administration in rolling back core rights. The Bush administration would basically say, “We just vaporized a citizen in a car with a terrorist, and we’re not sorry for it.”CUSACK: Well, yeah, the Bush administration basically said, “We may have committed a crime, but we’re the government, so what the fuck are you going to do about it?” Right? —and the Obama administration is saying, “We’re going to set this all in cement, expand the power of the executive, and pass the buck to the next guy.” Is that it?TURLEY: It’s the same type of argument when people used to say when they caught a criminal and hung him from a tree after a perfunctory five-minute trial. In those days, there was an attempt to pretend that they are really not a lynch mob, they were following a legal process of their making and their satisfaction. It’s just… it’s expedited. Well, in some ways, the administration is arguing the same thing. They’re saying, “Yes, we do believe that we can kill any U.S. citizen, but we’re going to talk amongst ourselves about this, and we’re not going to do it until we’re satisfied that this guy is guilty.”CUSACK: Me and the nameless death panel.TURLEY: Again, the death panel is ludicrous. The power that they’ve defined derives from the president’s role as Commander in Chief. So this panel –CUSACK: They’re falling back on executive privilege, the same as Nixon and Bush.TURLEY: Right, it’s an extension of the president. He could just ignore it. It’s not like they have any power that exceeds his own.CUSACK: So the death panel serves at the pleasure of the king, is what you’re saying.TURLEY: Yes, and it gives him cover so that they can claim that they’re doing something legal when they’re doing something extra-legal.CUSACK: Well, illegal, right?TURLEY: Right. Outside the law.CUSACK: So when does it get to a point where if you abdicate duty, it is in and of itself a crime? Obama is essentially creating a constitutional crisis not by committing crimes but by abdicating his oath that he swore before God — is that not a crime?TURLEY: Well, he is violating international law over things like his promise to protect CIA officials from any prosecution for torture. That’s a direct violation, which makes our country as a whole doubly guilty for alleged war crimes. I know many of the people in the administration. Some of us were quite close. And they’re very smart people. I think that they also realize how far outside the lines they are. That’s the reason they are trying to draft up these policies to give the appearance of the law. It’s like a Potemkin village constructed as a façade for people to pass through –CUSACK: They want to have a legal patina.TURLEY: Right, and so they create this Potemkin village using names. You certainly can put the name “due process” on a drone missile, but it’s not delivering due process.CUSACK: Yeah. And what about — well, we haven’t even gotten into the expansion of the privatization movement of the military “contractors” under George Bush or the escalation of drone strikes. I mean, who are they killing? Is it legal? Does anyone care — have we just given up as a country, saying that the Congress can declare war?TURLEY: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an “imperial presidency.”CUSACK: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn’t you say?TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.CUSACK: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, “Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?”TURLEY: The question is, “What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?” That is, certainly there are many people who believe –CUSACK: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, “I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage.”TURLEY: See, that’s what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes.Then I ask them, “Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, ‘I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they’re really good on healthcare?’” That is what it comes down to.The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, “Enough.” And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, “Enough. We’re not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We’re going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.CUSACK: Yeah, because most people reading this will sort of say, “Okay, this is all fine and good, but I’ve got to get to work and I’ve got to do this stuff, and I don’t know what these fucking guys are talking about. I don’t really care.”So let’s paint a scenario. My nephew, Miles, decides that he wants to grow dreadlocks, and he also decides he’s falling in love with the religion of Islam. And he changes his name. Instead of his name being Miles, he changes his name to a Muslim-sounding name.He goes to Washington, and he goes to the wrong organization or meeting, let’s say, and he goes to an Occupy Washington protest. He’s out there next to someone with a speaker, and a car bomb explodes. He didn’t set it off, and he didn’t do anything. The government can throw him in prison and never try him, right?TURLEY: Well, first of all, that’s a very good question.CUSACK: How do we illustrate the danger to normal people of these massive overreaches and radical changes to the Constitution that started under bush and have expanded under Obama?TURLEY: I mean, first of all, I know Miles, and –CUSACK: Yes.TURLEY: –and he is a little dangerous.CUSACK: Yes.TURLEY: I played basketball with him and you and I would describe him as a clear and present danger.CUSACK: I mean, and I know Eric Holder and Obama won’t throw him in prison because they’re nice guys, but let’s say that they’re out of office.TURLEY: Right, and the problem is that there is no guarantee. It has become almost Fellini-esque. Holder made the announcement a couple of years ago that they would try some defendants in a federal court while reserving military tribunals for others. The speech started out on the high ground, saying, “We have to believe in our federal courts and our Constitution. We’ve tried terrorists before, and therefore we’re transferring these individuals to federal court.”Then he said, “But we’re going to transfer these other individuals to Guantanamo Bay.” What was missing was any type of principle. You have Obama doing the same thing that George Bush did — sitting there like Caesar and saying, “You get a real trial and you get a fake trial.” He sent Zacarias Moussaoui to a federal court and then he threw Jose Padilla, who happened to be a U.S. citizen, into the Navy brig and held him without trial.Yet, Obama and Holder publicly assert that they’re somehow making a civil liberties point, and say, “We’re very proud of the fact that we have the courage to hold these people for a real trial, except for those people. Those people are going to get a tribunal.” And what happened after that was remarkable. If you read the press accounts, the press actually credits the administration with doing the right thing. Most of them pushed into the last paragraph the fact that all they did was split the people on the table, and half got a real trial and half got a fake trial.CUSACK: And don’t you think that’s, I mean, in the same way, if you talk to anybody, the demonization, whether rightful demonization, of Osama Bin Laden, was so intense that people were thrilled that he was assassinated instead of brought to trial and tried. And I thought, if the Nuremberg principles were right, the idea would be that you’d want to take this guy and put him on trial in front of the entire world, and, actually, if you were going to put him to death, you’d put him to death by lethal injection.TURLEY: You’ll recall reports came out that the Seals were told to kill Osama, and then reports came out to say that Osama might not have been armed when the Seals came in. The strong indication was that this was a hit.CUSACK: Yeah.TURLEY: The accounts suggest that this was an assassination from the beginning to the end, and that was largely brushed over in the media. There was never really any discussion of whether it was appropriate or even a good idea not to capture this guy and to bring him to justice.The other thing that was not discussed in most newspapers and programs was the fact that we violated international law. Pakistan insisted that they never approved our going into Pakistan. Think about it — if the government of Mexico sent in Mexican special forces into San Diego and captured a Mexican national, or maybe even an American citizen, and then killed him, could you imagine what the outcry would be?CUSACK: Or somebody from a Middle Eastern country who had their kids blown up by Mr. Cheney’s and Bush’s wars came in and decided they were going to take out Cheney–not take him back to try him, but actually just come in and assassinate him.TURLEY: Yet we didn’t even have that debate. And I think that goes to your point, John, about where’s the media?CUSACK: But, see, that’s a very tough principle to take, because everybody feels so rightfully loathsome about Bin Laden, right? But principles are not meant to be convenient, right? The Constitution is not meant to be convenient. If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.I think the best answer I ever heard about this stuff, besides sitting around a kitchen table with you and your father and my father, was I heard somebody, they asked Mario Cuomo, “You don’t support the death penalty…? Would you for someone who raped your wife?” And Cuomo blinked, and he looked at him, and he said, “What would I do? Well, I’d take a baseball bat and I’d bash his skull in… But I don’t matter. The law is better than me. The law is supposed to be better than me. That’s the whole point.”TURLEY: Right. It is one thing if the president argued that there was no opportunity to capture bin Laden because he was in a moving car, for example. And then some people could say, “Well, they took him out because there was no way they could use anything but a missile.” What’s missing in the debate is that it was quickly brushed over whether we had the ability to capture bin Laden.CUSACK: Well, it gets to [the late] Raiders owner Al Davis’ justice, which is basically, “Just win, baby.” And that’s where we are. The Constitution was framed by Al Davis. I never knew that.And the sad part for me is that all the conversations and these interpretations and these conveniences, if they had followed the Constitution, and if they had been strict in terms of their interpretations, it wouldn’t matter one bit in effectively handling the war on terror or protecting Americans, because there wasn’t anything extra accomplished materially in taking these extra leaps, other than to make it easier for them to play cowboy and not cede national security to the Republicans politically. Bin Laden was basically ineffective. And our overseas intel people were already all over these guys.It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that’s been hurt here has been us and the Constitution and any moral high ground we used to have. Because Obama and Holder are good guys, it’s okay. But what happens when the not-so-good guys come in, does MSNBC really want to cede and grandfather these powers to Gingrich or Romney or Ryan or Santorum or whomever — and then we’re sitting around looking at each other, like how did this happen? — the same way we look around now and say, “How the hell did the middle of America lose the American dream? How is all of this stuff happening at the same time?” And it gets back to lack of principle.TURLEY: I think that’s right. Remember the articles during the torture debate? I kept on getting calls from reporters saying, “Well, you know, the administration has come out with an interesting statement. They said that it appears that they might’ve gotten something positive from torturing these people.” Yet you’ve had other officials say that they got garbage, which is what you often get from torture…CUSACK: So the argument being that if we can get good information, we should torture?TURLEY: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I ask them. I say, “So, first of all, let’s remember, torture is a war crime. So what you’re saying is — “CUSACK: Well, war crimes… war crimes are effective.TURLEY: The thing that amazes me is that you have smart people like reporters who buy so readily into this. I truly believe that they’re earnest when they say this.Of course you ask them “Well, does that mean that the Nuremberg principles don’t apply as long as you can show some productive use?” We have treaty provisions that expressly rule out justifying torture on the basis that it was used to gain useful information.CUSACK: Look, I mean, enforced slave labor has some productive use. You get great productivity, you get great output from that shit. You’re not measuring the principle against the potential outcome; that’s a bad business model. “Just win, baby” — we’re supposed to be above that.TURLEY: But, you know, I’ll give you an example. I had one of the leading investigative journalists email me after one of my columns blasting the administration on the assassin list, and this is someone I deeply respect. He’s one of the true great investigative reporters. He objected to the fact that my column said that under the Obama policy he could kill U.S. citizens not just abroad, but could kill them in the United States. And he said, “You know, I agree with everything in your column except that.” He said, “You know, they’ve never said that they could kill someone in the United States. I think that you are exaggerating.”Yet, if you look at how they define the power, it is based on the mere perceived practicality and necessity of legal process by the president. They say the President has unilateral power to assassinate a citizen that he believes is a terrorist. Now, is the limiting principle? They argue that they do this “constitutional analysis,” and they only kill a citizen when it’s not practical to arrest the person.CUSACK: Is that with the death panel?TURLEY: Well, yeah, he’s talking about the death panel. Yet, he can ignore the death panel. But, more importantly, what does practicality mean? It all comes down to an unchecked presidential power.CUSACK: By the way, the death panel — that room can’t be a fun room to go into, just make the decision on your own. You know, it’s probably a gloomy place, the death panel room, so the argument from the reporter was, “Look, they can… if they kill people in England or Paris that’s okay, but they — “TURLEY: I also don’t understand, why would it make sense that you could kill a U.S. citizen on the streets of London but you might not be able to kill them on the streets of Las Vegas? The question is where the limiting principle comes from or is that just simply one more of these self-imposed rules? And that’s what they really are saying: we have these self-imposed rules that we’re only going to do this when we think we have to.CUSACK: So, if somebody can use the contra-Nuremberg argument — that principle’s now been flipped, that they were only following orders — does that mean that the person that issued the order through Obama, or the President himself, is responsible and can be brought up on a war crime charge?TURLEY: Well, under international law, Obama is subject to international law in terms of ordering any defined war crime.CUSACK: Would he have to give his Nobel Peace Prize back?TURLEY: I don’t think that thing’s going back. I’ve got to tell you… and given the amount of authority he’s claimed, I don’t know if anyone would have the guts to ask for it back.CUSACK: And the argument people are going to use is,”Look, Obama and Holder are good guys. They’re not going to use this power.” But the point is, what about after them? What about the apparatus? You’ve unleashed the beast. And precedent is everything constitutionally, isn’t it?TURLEY: I think that’s right. Basically what they’re arguing is, “We’re angels,” and that’s exactly what Madison warned against. As we discussed, he said if all men were angels you wouldn’t need government. And what the administration is saying is, “We’re angels, so trust us.”I think that what is really telling is the disconnect between what people say about our country and what our country has become. What we’ve lost under Bush and Obama is clarity. In the “war on terror” what we’ve lost is what we need the most in fighting terrorism: clarity. We need the clarity of being better than the people that we are fighting against. Instead, we’ve given propagandists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban an endless supply of material — allowing them to denounce us as hypocrites.Soon after 9/11 we started government officials talk about how the U.S. Constitution is making us weaker, how we can’t function by giving people due process. And it was perfectly ridiculous.CUSACK: Feels more grotesque than ridiculous.TURLEY: Yeah, all the reports that came out after 9/11 showed that 9/11 could’ve been avoided. For years people argued that we should have locked reinforced cockpit doors. For years people talked about the gaps in security at airports. We had the intelligence services that had the intelligence that they needed to move against this ring, and they didn’t share the information. So we have this long list of failures by U.S. agencies, and the result was that we increased their budget and gave them more unchecked authority.In the end, we have to be as good as we claim. We can’t just talk a good game. If you look at this country in terms of what we’ve done, we have violated the Nuremberg principles, we have violated international treaties, we have refused to accept–CUSACK: And you’re not just talking about in the Bush administration. You’re talking about –TURLEY: The Obama administration.CUSACK: You’re talking about right now.TURLEY: We have refused to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries. We now routinely kill in other countries. It is American exceptionalism – the rules apply to other countries.CUSACK: Well, these drone attacks in Pakistan, are they legal? Does anyone care? Who are we killing? Do they deserve due process?TURLEY: When we cross the border, Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, let alone an ally, and they insist that they have not agreed to these operations. They have accused us of repeatedly killing people in their country by violating their sovereign airspace. And we just disregard it. Again, its American exceptionalism, that we –CUSACK: Get out of our way or we’ll pulverize you.TURLEY: The rules apply to everyone else. So the treaties against torture and war crimes, sovereign integrity –CUSACK: And this also speaks to the question that nobody even bothers to ask: what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan now? Why are we there?TURLEY: Oh, yeah, that’s the real tragedy.CUSACK: It has the highest recorded suicide rate among veterans in history and no one even bothers to state a pretense of a definable mission or goal. It appears we’re there because it’s not convenient for him to really get out before the election. So in that sense he’s another guy who’s letting people die in some shithole for purely political reasons. I mean, it is what it is.TURLEY: I’m afraid, it is a political calculation. What I find amazing is that we’re supporting an unbelievably corrupt government in the Karzai administration.Karzai himself, just two days ago, called Americans “demons.” He previously said that he wished he had gone with the Taliban rather than the Americans. And, more importantly, his government recently announced that women are worth less than men, and he has started to implement these religious edicts that are subjugating women. So he has American women who are protecting his life while he’s on television telling people that women are worth less than men, and we’re funding –CUSACK: What are they, about three-fifths?TURLEY: Yeah, he wasn’t very specific on that point. So we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, we’re losing all these lives because it was simply politically inconvenient to be able to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq.CUSACK: Yeah. And, I mean, we haven’t even touched on the whole privatization of the military and what that means. What does it mean for the state to be funding at-cost-plus private mercenary armies and private mercenary security forces like Blackwater, or now their names are Xe, or whatever they’ve been rebranded as?TURLEY: Well, the United States has barred various international rules because they would allow for the prosecution of war crimes by both military and private forces. The U.S. barred those new rules because we didn’t want the ability of other countries to prosecute our people for war crimes. One of the things I teach in my constitutional class is that there is a need for what’s called a bright-line rule. That is, the value for bright-line rules is that they structure relations between the branches, between the government and citizens. Bright-line rules protect freedom and liberty. Those people that try to eliminate bright-line rules quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. The Obama administration, with the Bush administration, began by denying rights to people at Guantanamo Bay.And then they started to deny rights of foreigners who they accused of being terrorists. And eventually, just recently, they started denying rights to citizens and saying that they could kill citizens without any court order or review. It is the fulfillment of what is the nightmare of civil liberties. They crossed that bright line. Now they’re bringing these same abuses to U.S. citizens and changing how we relate to our government. In the end, we have this huge apparatus of the legal system, this huge court system, and all of it has become discretionary because the president can go ahead and kill U.S. citizens if he feels that it’s simply inconvenient or impractical to bring them to justice.CUSACK: Or if the great O, decides that he wants to be lenient and just throw them in jail for the rest of their life without trial, he can do that, right?TURLEY: Well, you’ve got Guantanamo Bay if you’re accused of being an enemy combatant. There is the concept in law that the lesser is included in the greater.So if the president can kill me when I’m in London, then the lesser of that greater is that he could also hold me, presumably, without having any court involvement. It’d be a little bizarre that he could kill me but if he held me he’d have to turn me over to the court system.CUSACK: Yeah. We’re getting into kind of Kafka territory. You know, with Bush I always felt like you were at one of those rides in an amusement park where the floor kept dropping and you kept kind of falling. But I think what Obama’s done is we’ve really hit the bottom as far as civil liberties go.TURLEY: Yet people have greeted this erosion of civil liberties with this collective yawn.CUSACK: Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –TURLEY: Right.CUSACK: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?TURLEY: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”CUSACK: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.TURLEY: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.CUSACK: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”TURLEY: Exactly.CUSACK: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.TURLEY: Right.* * *NOTE Ya know, Tuesday’s when Obama signs off on the kill list, and so every Wednesday I try to remember to ask the question: “Has Obama whacked any US citizens today?” But I can’t get an Obama supporter to give me an answer. Maybe if more people asked…. –lambertRead more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/john-cusack-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution.html#w7yCdWD8bZY6XrE1.99

WELCOME TO EAST GERMANYIf you read this Op Ed from the NYT and watch the video, you may realize just how close the US is to an outright police state. For those old enough, Richard Nixon would probably still be president if he had this under his control...remember he wanted to use the IRS to attack "jews" , journalists, and other enemies.This is more like a slippery mountain than slope.http://tinyurl.com/cu2lpqlMSM- (MAINSTREAMMEDIA)One of the consequences of the flooding of money into circulation in the 2000's, a move to offset the early Bush administration's dead in the water economic policy approach, was that values of assets became inflated. By inflated, I mean that the price exceeded the rate of inflation...often by a lot. That's how bubbles are formed and we have all witnessed the results in real estate.A less publicized result is the transformation of the MSM, particularly newspapers, into a (Wall Street) investment, rather than a "Fourth Estate". Rather than having a primary goal of being the gateway to information, newspapers were considered investment vehicles. How else could you think you could compete by cutting-drastically cutting-the number of reporters on the street? And once you did that, why should people buy your product when it is essentially running the same stuff as everyone else, especially when the internet and tv can deliver the news immediately. With the advent of social media on the internet, the differences have been geometrically increased . Of course there are many reasons for what has happened to newspapers. What is critical to me is that there has been a shift in approach by most newspapers from information to entertainment, and when added to the dreck that is tv news, we have a general population that is ignorant. Ignorance in a population is toxic to a democracy. The coverage of the presidential election is living proof of how shallow media coverage has become.A SECOND GILDED AGEThe Koch Brothers and their fellow billionaire oligarchs and energy company CEOs are finding it pretty easy to manipulate politics these days. You don't even have to outright buy politicians, although that is happening. If you threaten to unleash untold millions of negative ads against pols who aren't willing to knuckle under, you can get the same results (thank your SCOTUS for making Citizens United an official and legal game plan). If you doubt that just watch a true progressive, Senator Sherrod Brown's reelection campaign in Ohio.An even better metaphor is the quest ongoing in states in the northeast, Pennsylvania and Ohio to allow "fracking" for to remove natural gas from below the surface. This has meant new found riches to some land owners, but often at the expense of their neighbors health. This is a classic example of unrestrained by government capitalism. Unrestrained by either buying off the gatekeepers, or reducing the number of gatekeepers through "austerity". Either way, most of us lose. Fracking will lead to 21st century Love Canals. If you are too young to remember Love Canal I suggest you google it.Here's an article that cites the on-the-ground experience of neighbors and towns from fracking:http://climate-connections.org/2012/08/21/fouled-waters-after-gas-wells-drilled-woodlands-pa-tries-to-survive-without-clean-water/It isn't pretty.A VIEW OF AMERICA FROM ABROAD

Today, the US claims the legal right to indefinitely detain its citizens;
the president can order the assassination of a citizen without so much
as even a hearing; the government can spy on its citizens without a
court order; and its officials are immune from prosecution for war
crimes. It doesn't help that the US has less than 5% of the world's
population but almost a quarter of its prison inmates, many of them
victims of a "war on drugs" that is rapidly losing legitimacy
in the rest of the world. Assange's successful pursuit of asylum from
the US is another blow to Washington's international reputation. At the
same time, it shows how important it is to have democratic governments
that are independent of the US and – unlike Sweden and the UK – will not
collaborate in the persecution of a journalist for the sake of
expediency. Hopefully other governments will let the UK know that
threats to invade another country's embassy put them outside the bounds
of law-abiding nations.

Read the entire Guardian post. The US and its surrogate nations have kicked off the covers and exposed the underlying rot.

DOTS

Apparently the UK, on orders from the US, is willing to threaten or actually betray the concept of Diplomatic Immunity to invade the Ecuador Consulate to arrest Julian Assange. If you are not familiar with this, you should take the time to read up on it...it is all about how important it is to your government to hide stuff from you, important enough that the government is willing to put its own consulates at risk to arrest and deport Assange to the US where he would be subject to a mock trial.

A judge in Pennsylvania refuses to set aside a voter id law which is aimed directly at keeping some brown people from voting this November-a 21st Century Poll Tax.

A candidate for the highest elected office in the US refuses to provide tax returns which would provide some insight into who he is, while he seems determined to not answer any direct questions that are not soft balls.

A handful of billionaires are going to spend enough to push the election results in ways that are favorable to them, which apparently includes ignoring Global Warming. The fact that this will lead to untold loss of lives and property doesn't offset the financial costs of changing their operations.

The whole Julian Assange thing, which has been going on for 2 yearshas been virtually ignored by the mainstream media in the US, and where it has been reported, it was entirely covered as if the reporting was done at the direction of the government.

When I add these dots together I come to some larger frame conclusions:

The US is the World's 500 pound gorilla, and a total bully. Other nations, Sweden and the UK, are willing to violate laws to suit the whims of the US government.

That has been true for a number of years, but the fact that governments are so willing to be transparent in their efforts to do things under the covers tells me that we have reached the point where they feel impervious to any kind of pubic reaction. You don't take the action of violating diplomatic immunity in such a public way if you are concerned about reactions from your citizens.

We have reached an age of effective tyranny in the US and its attendant nations. US citizens are no more free than people in Russia and China. We have vestiges of freedom, but without a justice system that is singular, rather than effectively having 2 sets of laws, we are really not free unless you are an elite.

The US will suffer the same fate as every other empire. When you are so bold in flouting your own laws, laws outlined in the US Constitution, you are sowing the seeds of your destruction. Empires always crumble from within. The snowball is rolling downhill faster and faster.

PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

I will be a Penn State rooter this year and for the forseeable future.

While my brother attended PSU, I never felt any real affinity for the school, and I did not really like Joe Paterno. He struck me as a real controlling dick. When I watched Penn State games, and here in the Philadelphia area that meant every game was televised, I was a passive viewer.

Now that the University has been punished severely for the sins of a very few...including Paterno, I will root for the success of the football team, and I will be very interested in seeing whether attendance at the home games continues to be over 100,000 a game.

I think it will. Nit grads are very proud of their university.

TRUST

It is difficult to imagine any relationship surviving when one of the parties has no trust in the other. It doesn't mean they cannot do things together, but when it comes to doing something meaningful, it doesn't work without trust.

If the experience of having the SCOTUS appoint a president, or having a president lie the country into war (after allowing the country to be attacked on its home turf), or having the Fed dole out trillions (in secret) to the same banks that put the country into an economic hole), or having the SCOTUS unleash Citizens United on what little remained of our election process, hasn't awakened the public, its hard to imagine anything waking them to the loss of the Constitution.

That said, each time the foundation of what we thought we knew of our democracy is chipped away some more, the implicit trust in the rule of law loses a little more.

All you have to do is look at what is going on in Russia and compare it to what is happening here. The difference is only a matter of degree.

YOUR VOTE STILL MATTERS

Hot off the press: the Pennsylvania judge hearing the voter ID law case has upheld the law. This is a return to a "Poll Tax" in a different form, and a desperate attempt to steal yet another election.

And it is a direct result of Pennsylvania, like Wisconsin and some other states reacting to the pitiful Democratic legislatures when they were given power in 2008 election results after the Bush debacle. The voting public wanted results, and with the combination of Blue Dog Dems and Republicans voting as a block, the perception was one of total disappointment with the controlling party, hence an almost total turn around in the 2010 election results.

Unfortunately, we no longer have a traditional Republican Party. What we have is a go for the balls Party that doesn't bother with subtlety. If you factor in the growth of the non-white population in the US, you either are seeing a last grasp at retaining power, or a removal of the curtain on our non-democratic Oligarchy.

Will the "Independent Voters" recognize the slippery slope we are on, that first the poor then the middle class lose their rights? Will the non-crazy Republican voters come to grips with the outright racism of their Party as it now exists, and is that enough to have them change their vote? Will progressives wake up to the fact that a large segment of the Democratic Party is Republican Light?

My answer: As much as I am not an Obama lover, if Romney wins this election, Canada is looking better and better.

ELITES WIN EITHER WAY

My late good friend, Jack Kilpatrick and I would have long discussions about the upcoming presidential election of 1992. Jack was a lifelong Democrat, and was enamored of Bill Clinton, as were many at that time. I think Clinton reminded many of Jack Kennedy, which was surely not a coincidence as Clinton wanted to emulate Kennedy (in many ways).

I did not trust Clinton. On the other hand, I did trust candidate Barach Obama. Maybe it was because Obama was a minority candidate, or maybe because he talked like an antidote to Bush, I trusted him.

I now see Obama and Clinton as similar. Talk like a Democrat, act like a Republican. Similar as well in that they are "pragmatists" which can now be interpreted as "no use fighting it when you can get rich going along". And to be fair, there isn't any organized oposition to what either was/is doing.

The cynic in me says that that is why the Republicans act more and more insane. It drives the independents towards the guy who is giving the elites everything they want.

As I've stated before, it is a Hobson's choice.

NEXT TIME YOU ARE WONDERINGwhy the your cities are crumbling before your eyes, here's one of the main reasons:

Right now, the United States is militarily engaged in one form or another in almost a hundred countries...

This is what they mean when they talk about "guns or butter"...

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

From Avedon Carol:

Circling the drainIt's one thing to see this story in Salon (with far less discussion at the time than it should have received), but it's another when it turns up at The Washington Times:

'Anti-Occupy' law ends American's right to protest:Thanks
to almost zero media coverage, few of us know about a law passed this
past March, severely limiting our right to protest. The silence may have
been due to the lack of controversy in bringing the bill to law: Only
three of our federal elected officials voted against the bill's passage.
Yes, Republicans and Democrats agreed on something almost 100%.
[...]
The
First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees us the rights of free
speech and assembly. A fundamental purpose of our free speech guarantee
is to invite dispute. Protests can and have been the catalyst for
positive change. Thus while we despise that protestors can burn our flag
as protected political speech, and we hate that Neo-Nazis can march
down our streets, we recognize the rights of these groups to do what
they do and we send our troops across the world to fight for these
rights.
Last year's "occupy movement" scared the government. On
March 8, President Obama signed a law that makes protesting more
difficult and more criminal. The law is titled the Federal Restricted
Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, and it passed unanimously in the
Senate and with only three "no" votes in the House. It was called the
"Trespass Bill" by Congress and the "anti-Occupy law" by everyone else
who commented.
The law "improves" public grounds by forcing people
- protestors - elsewhere. It amends an older law that made it a federal
crime to "willfully and knowingly" enter a restricted space. Now you
will be found guilty of this offense if you simply "knowingly" enter a
restricted area, even if you did not know it was illegal to do so. The
Department of Homeland Security can designate an event as one of
"national significance," making protests or demonstrations near the
event illegal.
The law makes it punishable by up to ten years in
jail to protest anywhere the Secret Service "is or will be temporarily
visiting," or anywhere they might be guarding someone. Does the name
Secret tell you anything about your chances of knowing where they are?
The law allows for conviction if you are "disorderly or disruptive," or
if you "impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or
official functions." You can no longer heckle or "boo" at a political
candidate's speech, as that would be disruptive.
After you swallow
all of this and correctly conclude that it is now very easy to be
prosecuted for virtually any public protest, you should brace yourself
and appreciate that it is even worse. Today, any event that is
officially defined as a National Special Security Event has Secret
Service protection. This can include sporting events and concerts.
The
timing of the law was not coincidental. The bill was presented to the
Senate, after House passage, on November 17, 2011, during an intense
nationwide effort to stop the Occupy Wall Street protests. Two days
before, hundreds of New York police conducted a raid on the
demonstrators' encampment in Zucotti Park, shutting it down and placing
barricades.This law chips away our
First Amendment rights. Its motivation is 100 percent politically based,
as it was designed to silence those who would protest around
politicians giving speeches. Both Republicans and Democrats agreed they
did not want hecklers at their rallies. If you want to protest a
politician speaking to a crowd now, you can do so maybe a half mile or
so away.

http://sideshow.me.uk/

HIS MITTNESS

Without going into a lengthy discussion of why, let me just say that I was a former Republican Committeeman in Philadelphia, I voted for Richard Nixon the first time, and I can never see myself voting for a Republican running for national office. Not that it matters that much: it amounts to losing whatever we thought we had slowly with a Democrat or quickly with a Republican.

Like the country as a whole, the Republican Party has lost its mind.

Anyway, as loathsome as I believe Mitt Romney to be, I find it incomprehensible that a candidate who had as his chief remaining goal in life to outdo his father and become President of the United States, would not foresee his federal income tax returns as a matter of public information, especially given his considerable wealth.

Is it arrogance? Perhaps. Mitt is an incredibly arrogant person. But even arrogance doesn't explain the offshore accounts. Maybe Mitt expects the SCOTUS to appoint him, just like it appointed W. Or maybe Mitt knows that the curtain has been raised, that it is now so obvious that we do not have a functioning representative form of government that he doesn't even have to pretend.

JOE PATERNOI was never a Joe Paterno fan, but I wasn't a hater either. I never considered him to be a great coach. He was, imo, a superb manager, and unlike so many of us, his ambition, rather than to become wealthy, was to build PSU into a national entity (with a by product of major media adoration and recognition for himself). He turned down numerous pro football coaching opportunities which would have yielded much higher salaries. What they would not have offered was the type of feudal lordship that major successful college football coaches enjoy, and that became for Paterno at Penn State what could best be described as a Fiefdom. Other than being part of a royal family in England, or perhaps the Pope, there probably isn't any position anywhere that comes close to having the power that major college football coaches enjoy. If the game of football is a metaphor for war, then each Saturday in the fall, the Little Kings of Fiefdoms send their warriors out to battle the other's warriors, backed by their students, alumni and townspeople (towns like Madison, Ann Arbor, and Bloomington). It is Feudal.Penn State went from a primarily agricultural university located in the middle of rural Pennsylvania to one of the premier state universities in the country, and the hub of an economically sound surrounding area. Next to being a state capitol, a university town might be the most secure economic area in the US, outside of the District of Columbia of course. And clearly, Joe Paterno was a primary catalyst in making that happen.However, the more his stature and power grew, the more susceptible he became to allowing hubris to cloud his vision. The Greeks wrote plays about it. in fact, the whole Penn State saga would make an excellent Greek Tragedy. Shakespeare wrote plays about it. And if you have watched the tv show, Breaking Bad, shows are still being written about it. Power is seductive which is one of the reasons why the wealthy constantly seek more and more as they see wealth as a measure of their power. And having power does change people. Breaking Bad is really a show that documents the corruption of character that is often a result of the gaining of power. Power corrupts...absolute power corrupts absolutely.Examples of leaders who do not fall or have not fallen prey to power's effect on one's hubris, are few and far between. How else do you explain Obama, a Constitutional Law professor, and sworn to "protect and defend The Constitution, secretly undermining The Constitution? I say undermining because I don't recall any Amendments that authorize the President to spy on citizens, to arrest and detain citizens for an indeterminate length of time without a hearing or trial, and even to unilaterally order the murder of "terrorists" without any proof of such. The rationale for Obama is probably similar to Paterno's and/or the leaders at PSU: it is for the good of the organization/government. It is indeed a slippery slope. A coach who supposedly would not tolerate cheating by alums or players turns his back on children who are victims of a sexual predator.The only leaders who spring to mind are Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson. Carter had to know that in speaking up about energy independence, he was inviting all out attack by big oil. As much as I disliked Johnson, he had the balls to stand behind the civil rights movement, and to his everlasting credit, he reached the point where he would rather resign than continue to lie to pursue a war that cost so many lives, for so little possible benefit.The lesson is that those we treat as gods, of being above mere men, have feet of clay, and they should be made to stand up to vigorous questioning before they get their way. Few of us could withstand the seduction of power. Who among us can pass a mirror without looking at it?PINK FLOYDSomewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street Where you can speak out loud About your doubts and fears And what's more no-one ever disappears You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door. You can relax on both sides of the tracks And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control And everyone has recourse to the law And no-one kills the children anymore. And no one kills the children anymore. THE GUNNER'S DREAMCHARLES STARBUCK JRAugust 1st was my father, Charles Starbuck Jr's birthday. He was born in Liverpool, England in 1899, an unbelievable 2 Centuries ago. He died of cancer on June 4th, 1964, shortly before my first daughter was born. Both of my grandfathers were dead when I was born.I don't doubt that my father loved me...I don't believe it is possible for parents or their children to not love each other. Liking each other is another thing entirely. Looking back, I don't remember ever having a conversation with my father that revealed anything about him. What I did know of him came from either my mother, who stopped saying anything positive about him after they separated and subsequently divorced, or my spinster unmarried aunt, who lived in New England her entire life. My grandfather was a butler to a family, either in Boston or in Worcester, Mass. He and my Nana lived in a tiny house in South Lancaster, Mass which was sort of in between Worcester and Boston. It is not clear, but it would appear that Charlie's parents were married in boston but returned to England where Charlie was born, and then returned to America.Charlie was educated at Worcester Prep...don't know who paid...where he was a track guy (miler), and apparently an excellent student, as he attended and graduated from MIT. According to my mother, he volunteered (as a holder of British citizenship) for the newly formed Canadian RAF which was formed to help Britain in WWI, prior to the US entering the war. (It should be noted that the US entered the war some 6 months before the end) He would have been 18 or 19. He was a pilot and fought in battles which included the WWI top ace, Baron Von Richthofen, which was one thing he did acknowledge when, as a boy, I asked him to confirm.Upon graduating from MIT, he joined Western Electric which was part of the AT&T/Bell Telephone family. He remained with them for 42 years. It was his employment with Bell that saw him transferred from the NY area, I was born in NYC, to Pittsburgh and within 6 months to Philadelphia.He was a Captain in the US Army during WWII, stationed in DC and working for the predecessor to the CIA. He was involved in breaking communication codes which played a big part for the US successes in the later stages of the war. He was offered a position in the nascent CIA but was primarily concerned with the security of Mother Bell. Charlie was married three times, my mother being the last. His first wife died of cancer leaving two daughters. His second marriage, which was shortly after his first wife died ended in tragedy when his young wife committed suicide, possibly driven by post partum depression after my brother was born. His third marriage to my mother followed a couple of years later.Charlie was a sports fan. I still remember when we finally bought our first tv, around 1947 or 48, we watched a Notre Dame football game on a Saturday...my introduction to college football. He was a life long Red Sox fan. He loved baseball and spent time playing catch with me. The other sports interest for him was boxing...Friday Night Fights was a standard and he would allow me to watch with him after my normal bedtime.It's funny how little things remain in one's memory of a relationship. As I said, I don't ever recall any meaningful or revealing conversation with my Dad. But my memories include my walking up to the corner to wait for him to exit the bus home from work...I was probably around 5 yrs old. I also recall him taking me with him on a Saturday afternoon to a local taproom where he would drink beer while I would pound sodas, an occurrence which did not thrill my mother, and would be later hurled back at him during one of their frequent disagreements.And of his taking off from work in center city to take a couple of busses to watch me play high school football. He was divorced from my mother. We would make eye contact during the game, and perhaps say hi after the game, but nothing more. We would go our separate ways via public transportation. (Our football field was located pretty far from our school in Germantown and this was before busses were provided as a form of transportation for students, except for travelling to away games. Otherwise, we were on our own to get to practice and then home after practice.)If we are, as I believe, a product of DNA and our behavioral upbringing, then there are things that I seemed to have inculcated from my father that those who know me will recognize. He was a responder, not one to initiate conversation. He was not a small talk guy. He had a short temper, but most often would use facial expressions to let you know of his displeasure. He would be married 3 times, have 5 children, and yet spend the final 7 years of his life after the divorce from my mother, essentially alone. He never got to experience my kids, and my sisters, who each had 3 kids, lived far away. So on this August first, 113 years after his birth...Happy Birthday, Pop.I love you. CAN HUMANS SURVIVE CAPITALISM?PART III am not suggesting that we find ourselves being driven over a cliff because of Capitalism. That just happens to be how things are run these days in most of the western world. Nor is it due to the form of government. And without a total revolution, both Capitalism and Democracy are unlikely to change. So where do we go from here?

Change if it is to come will have to be from outside the system. That is no guarantee that things will not revert to where they are today, but that is how things work. Life is a pendulum.

The Change Agents will be scattered, and the events will be unconnected at first, but there will be a combined stirring of the pot. The Middle East uprisings were triggered by a guy finally being so frustrated with things that he set himself on fire.

The oligarchs will have to be experiencing Fear which doesn't have to necessarily be due to violence, but to clear threats to their continued dominance.

Change, if it comes, will be driven from the bottom, from people who feel they have little or nothing to lose.

An underlying cause will be the realization that we have two sets of laws based on one's wealth and power, which will lead to an undermining of the judicial system.

While change will come from the bottom up, the leader(s) will come from the middle class, once people realize that they are not part of the elite, and never will be part of the elite.

The longer things go on the way they are going, the more violent the eruption when and if it does happen.

Part IThink about working for a corporation that you know is poisoning people, directly and indirectly, at an alarming rate. What is your responsibility as a human as opposed to that of an employee? There are, of course, different sides to that question. In a perfect world, it is likely that a lot of people would opt to do something about it...become a whistleblower if laws are being broken, or leaving for another job in another industry for example. But whistleblowers generally get blown out by the power and money thrown against them by corporations, and we are now in an era where, for most, it is very unreal to think you can leave both a job and an industry without it costing a great deal of money or career track, or both. This is not a condemnation of anyone, but rather, a question of whether we can expect mankind to survive an increasingly powerful corporate control of government. The Koch brothers, multi, multi billionaires are funding organizations that are hell bent on either totally gutting the EPA, or eliminating it altogether. This is understandable from a corporate standpoint...no constraints is considered better than constraints. But when does the common good become important enough to be considered by corporations? For oldsters like moi, things like the marketing of tobacco products pre warning labels, or the Love Canal were prime examples of no constraints. Look no further than the BP-Gulf of Mexico to see we are quickly headed back to those Love Canal days. Imagine, we have a graphic example of the toxic danger of drilling in open waters, a neutron bomb effect on marine life in the Gulf, and Congress and the president have agreed to allow more drilling. Or how about fracking, where the process forces toxic elements into the ground water that humans and animals have to ingest? These are not difficult choices...not if the choice is between a healthier environment vs making more money...but with the enormous financial power of corporations, there is no question of how things will go. Just watch the Keystone Pipeline as it becomes a reality.We see Big Pharma consistently pushing unsafe drugs or unsafe drug usage. Their decisions are pretty cut and dried: can more money be made by doing that vs any financial penalties when and if they are caught? The term collateral damage now extends to corporate decisions, and it is just as deadly to the innocent as when it is used in a war.All of which begs the question: Given the (Public) corporate mantra to make the most money "for the shareholders", and the control of Congress by corporate and supremely wealthy individuals, how long before a decision puts the future of the world as we know it, at risk? This isn't a new turn of events. We did steal large sections of the land from both indigenous peoples and adjoining nations (Mexico)., following the quest for more power and wealth by the nations that had armies and navies. Corporations have pretty much replaced States in this regard. And Corporate Culture has superseded any humanist culture we may have had, if we ever really had such, which is certainly arguable.

DOES THE UNITED STATES STILL OPERATE AS A DEMOCRACY?PART III have just finished reading Erik Larson's In The Garden Of Beasts , a non fiction book that takes place in Germany during the years between 1933 and 1938, and follows William E. Dodd, a Chicago University professor who was appointed Ambassador to Germany and his family who moved to Berlin to serve the US.What was chilling to me was how Hitler was able to become Dictator in a democratic country, and to do so while a terror campaign was being openly waged against Jews and other "undesirables". At one point, in 1934 it was thought by Dodd that Hitler would be cut off at the knees politically which seemed to be a popular idea with a segment of the German people. Obviously it did not happen.I'm not trying to draw a parallel to the US, but a frustrated and angry populace is easily directed towards a dictator, especially when the media is not vigilant and independent. Anyone think our media would be described that way? In the space on one decade, we have had a president appointed by SCOTUS, two wars started based on deliberate lies, financial bubbles that were fostered by the Federal Reserve, criminal wrongdoing by Wall Street that could still bring the world economy to a halt, massive off-shoring of jobs, decimation of unions and now of government unions, and all of it with little or no reaction from the general public. It isn't a stretch to think that it a form of dictatorship is possible.Which is all background for my considering whether or not to vote for the presidency in November. It is a Hobson's choice. I have voted in every election since I turned 21, which was the legal voting age back then. In just about every presidential election, there was always the question: Is this the best (candidate) we can do? But there was always a choice between ideologies. No longer. The Democratic Party is now Republican light. With few exceptions, all of our congress people are feeding out of the same trough, and it isn't to the benefit of the general public.The only reason I would even think of voting for Obama is that the other guy is such a lame dick. Yes, maybe Romney would pick a worse Supreme, but Roberts controls the court and I don't see things changing for the better in my lifetime. I cannot vote for Romney. But on the other hand, Obama may be worse. He is smooth, he is clever. He is also carrying on many of Bush's policies while significantly diminishing what is left of The Constitution...this from a law prof who taught Constitutional Law. We now have a president who has given himself the approval to kill anyone he alone deems to be an enemy, including US citizens. No court approval, no formal accusation, no trial. If that is constitutional what is the difference between how the Soviet Union operated and our Constitution? The "most transparent administration in history"...his campaign promise...has actively pursued whistleblowers while (likely) criminals on Wall Street are ignored, or Fed (pun intended) more of the public's money. There are no doubt dictators who wish they could get away with a similar approach without public attention. Nor has Obama has chosen to legally pursue the people responsible for lying us into a war, a war that caused many, many thousands to lose their lives. Joe Paterno lost a statue for that kind of approach.I will vote this November, but I will write in a name for the presidency...probably Bernie Sanders. I've reached the conclusion that it wouldn't be any more of a wasted vote than if I voted for either candidate. At least I won't feel dirty after my vote.It has become increasingly clear that the will of the people is not a driving force in what was intended to be a "Representative Democracy". You don't have to look far to get the evidence: Tax the rich? No way. Feed the poor? As little as possible.Cut military spending? You're kidding, right?Make assault weapons illegal? Sure, hold your breath.Universal health care, like every other western country? Impossible.Only public financing of elections? Corporations are considered to be part of the public, yes?You get the idea. And I would accept the argument that this isn't something new, it is just more obvious. It isn't a defect in Democracy as much as it is the inevitable result in any form of government...the oligarchs, the extremely wealthy, always get their way. Of course, as they allow their greed to push more and more to get every advantage possible, regardless of the consequences for the non-wealthy, it becomes more intolerable for the rest of the people.If you want an example of this runaway greed, just consider the US intransigence on climate change. I could be wrong, but isn't climate change going to affect the Koch brothers and their heirs physically too? These are multi billionaires who could not spend their accumulated wealth in three lifetimes. Wouldn't a serious conversation about climate change be better for their heirs in the long run? Guess not.It then becomes a question of time before there is a revolt. It will take a lot longer to happen in the US because we have been brainwashed for generations, and we have had an enduring style of government. Europe, on the other hand, has lived with the turmoil caused by bad governments in neighboring countries which have had a spillover effect on the rest of Europe. When the effects of war are still in recent memory, you tend to have a visceral understanding of being financially on the bottom. Watch what is happening in Spain and Italy as the effects of austerity are rained down on the heads of the non-oligarchs. It will be quite a while before we see mass demonstrations here in the US.If change is to come, it is unlikely to come from within the system, in my opinion, which is the thrust of the #OWS movement. Because #OWS in not attempting to be a part of the established political world, it represents a real threat to the establishment, which is why the reaction to them has been like that of a repressive regime in some cases. Peaceful protests have been turned violent by the "authorities" in the form of the police in NYC as example. Nothing upsets authorities like a lack of control whether it is deemed to be potentially violent or not.At any rate, this has given me cause to ponder whether I am going to vote in November, which I will further address in my next post.PHILADELPHIA...WORLD'S LARGEST SMALL TOWNPhiladelphia has had a well deserved reputation from the time that I grew up in the '40s and '50s as a very provincial town. It was and continues to be a city of neighborhoods and parishes. When demographics changed in neighborhoods, a lot of the people in those neighborhoods essentially shifted the neighborhood to a suburban location. West Philly to Delaware County; Northeast Philly to Bucks County; Germantown to Montgomery County, and so forth.Growing up in Mt Airy and Germantown was like growing up in a small town. Even though they were part of Philadelphia and only a short train ride to center city, they were for all intents and purposes like suburban life.Germantown was a wonderful place to grow up. Besides being a hub for Revolutionary homes and historical battle locations, it had a broad range of economic and cultural sub-neighborhoods. You had large, stately mansions, single family and twin homes as well as various size row home neighborhoods. You had your Italian area, Black area, Wasp area and a lot of Irish and Germans spread throughout. Some of the streets are one way very narrow streets, the kind that look great when you see them in pictures in a foreign country, but looked less than great here. If you were from any neighborhood in Germantown you were proud of it, and I'm pretty sure that would also have been said for people from most neighborhoods.This was a pre-gang era. Yes, you might catch shit if you walked through, say, the Italian neighborhood, but it usually depended on your actions rather than neighborhood hostility. If there were fights, they usually involved fists, but rarely knives and almost never guns. Kids used to hang out on porches during the non-school times like the summer, but they were not considered gangs. If a kid from one neighborhood got jumped for some reason by kids from another neighborhood, then there might be a group retaliation. But those were rare. This was probably due in part to the fact that kids knew kids in other neighborhoods from school, so they weren't fear of the unknown strangers.Where I grew up, if you were doing something you shouldn't be doing, word was sure to get back to your parents. And if word got back to your parents, they corrected you rather than get upset with the neighbor. But the neighbors also kept an eye on kids as a security kind of thing. Kids and parents felt safe in neighborhoods.People in Philadelphia tended to grow up and remain in the area. If they left, they found their way back usually for family reasons. If your family basically never left, you had reason to return. This could be somewhat daunting to people who moved to the area from elsewhere. Philly folk tend to be provincial, but once they feel comfortable with you, they readily accept you. I've met lots of people who grew up elsewhere and who have totally adopted the Philly area as home. Of course, jobs and employers used to be considered as a stable part of the area. No longer and that's bound to have an effect on someone's ability to remain in the area.Local plants like Budd and Philco disappeared from the landscape long ago, and haven't been replaced except for maybe gambling casinos. Not a good trend.Part IIA psychology professor made the comment that 85% of what we know is learned in the first 6 years of life. True or not, a good argument can be made that where you grow up and where and with whom you go to school are of extreme importance.This was beautifully drawn out in The Wire's 4th season when that season had the Baltimore School System as its core story...the poorest of the poor neighborhood school. How do you think you, or your children would have turned out had that been your learning environment? My mother knew the principal of The Henry H Houston public school which, while in Mt Airy, was not the closest school to our home. She managed to get my brother and I enrolled there. That school today would be looked at like a private school if it were in the city, or like a suburban public school in an affluent neighborhood. We had small teacher-student ratios. The school was all white-I didn't go to school or live around blacks until I hit high school. A fairly large percentage of Houston's students were jewish, although that never occurred to me as something worth noting. I did attend bar/bat mitzvahs, but the only thing of note to me then was wearing a yarmulke during the ceremony. There were no organized school sports. I played football, baseball and basketball and there was always a game after school...usually until it got dark. Most families back then had only one parent working outside the home, so having organized activities after school was not the same kind of issue that it became when most families had either both parents working or were single parent.I had no idea that I was part jewish (maternal jewish grandmother), if one can be part jewish. Neither my mother or father ever bothered to inform me of that, not that it would have mattered to me then. It wasn't until my experience in 9th grade at Central High School, at that time the elite academic public high school for boys that I encountered my first taste of prejudice.I was in line for something when for no reason, a kid behind me smacked me across the back of my head and said something about "you jew". I wheeled around ready to fight (I was always pretty aggressive) and 2 of his buddies grabbed me as I responded, "Who are you calling a jew?" Here I was, not aware that I was part jewish, and never having felt one way or the other about jews, and I was defensive about being called a jew. ( The kid who smacked me, a Greek named Chris, and I became friends. Not best buds, but how-ya-doin' type friends.)My observation is that when public schools are not functioning well, those who are able to either leave the area for better schools, or send their kids to private (now Charter) schools. The culture of the school changes which in turn sees more parents pull their kids out. Neighborhoods change and eventually a city or town changes, and not for the better. I'd like to see a study of that kind of cycle in Detroit or Cleveland. It is a cycle that is hard to halt or change. I have no idea of how good or bad Houston School is today. Most of the neighborhoods that feed it still look pretty good, so maybe it is surviving well despite the crisis in the Philadelphia School System. The survival of a vibrant public school system is critical to a city's long range prospects.